Data-driven phrasing for speech synthesis in low-resource languages

We present an approach to build phrase break prediction models when synthesizing text in low resource languages. This method allows building models without depending on the availability of part of speech taggers, or corpus with hand annotated breaks. We use the same speech data used for building a synthetic voice, to deduce acoustic phrase breaks. We perform unsupervised part of speech induction over a small text corpus in the language at hand. We use these tags and train a grammar based phrasing model. In this paper, we show results for the languages: English, Portuguese and Marathi, which suggest that we can quickly build very reasonable phrasing models for new languages using very little data.