Prosodic phrasing for speech synthesis of written telecommunications by the deaf

A text-to-speech parser is described that applies to texts generated by users of telecommunications devices for the deaf (TDD). The parser´s main tasks are to perform lexical regularization of abbreviations and some nonstandard forms in TDD texts and to identify prosodic phrase boundaries for the synthesized speech. Rules for prosodic phrasing are based on the description of discourse neutral phrasing presented in J. Bachenko and E. Fitzpatrick (see Comput. Linguist., vol.16, no.3, p.155-70, 1990). They use a mix of syntactic and phonological factors to identify prosodic phrase boundaries, but, unlike the original rules, build no hierarchical structure. As a component of the text-to-speech system, the parser was used for three months in a successful field trial