A Three-Stage Text Normalization Strategy for Mandarin Text-to-Speech Systems

Text normalization is an important component in mandarin Text-to-Speech system. This paper develops a taxonomy of Non-Standard Words (NSW´s) based on a Large-scale Chinese corpus and proposes a three-stage text normalization strategy: Finite State Automata (FSA) for initial classification, Maximum Entropy (ME) Classifier & Rules for further classification and General Rules for standard word conversion. The three-stage approach achieves Precision of 96.02% in experiments, 5.21% higher than that of simple rule based approach and 2.21% higher than that of simple machine learning method. Experiments results show that the approach of three-stage disambiguation strategy for text normalization makes considerable improvement, and works well in real TTS system.