Syllabification and stress assignment in phonetic Sanskrit text

The authors of this paper have developed a speech synthesis system for Sanskrit. This paper will present the Grapheme to Phoneme (G2P) converter module used in this system which converts Sanskrit text in Devanagari UTF-8 into its phonetic representation with assigned syllable boundaries and stress values of the syllable. The stress rules applied here are very basic and are different from Vedic supra-segmental svaras, Though the Sanskrit G2P converter, converting Unicode Sanskrit text into plain phone sequence representation, was already there, it lacked syllabification and stress marking. Syllable is very important unit in speech and in speech technology. Festival framework, which is used for said Sanskrit speech synthesis and many other speech synthesis systems, by default, requires the phonetic representation with syllable boundaries and stress values. Also many features used for F₀ and duration modeling depend on syllable. Thus the phonetic representation with and without syllabification makes a significant difference.