An advanced NLP framework for high-quality Text-to-Speech synthesis

In order to build a TTS (Text-to-Speech) synthesis system one must provide two key components: a NLP (Natural Language Processing) stage, which essentially operates on the input text, and a speech generation stage to produce the desired output. These two distinct levels must exchange both data and commands to produce intelligible and natural speech. As the complete TTS task relies on many distinct scientific areas, any achievement toward standardization can minimize the effort and increase the dynamic of the results. This paper gives an overview of the NLP stage in the TTS system for Romanian language built by our collective, and describes the integration into the system of SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language), as a nowadays well recognized standard for TTS document authoring and inter-modules communication.