Disambiguation for polyphones of Chinese based on two-pass unified approach

The paper addresses the issue of Chinese polyphones and the disambiguity approach. Three methods, dictionary matching, language models and voting scheme, are used to retrieve the token´s information and then disambiguate the prediction of polyphones. The best precision for these methods achieves 92.72%. Furthermore we proposed the two-pass unified approach to improve the performance with various empirical thresholds. Our approach is superior to the well-known MS Word 2007, and the final precision rate reaches 94.3%. It proves that the proposed approach can resolve effectively text-to-phoneme conversion in Chinese TTS system.