Schedule: 2009-09-12 (12:00 - 12:45)
Parallel Session 6 (Room A-25)

Title: Sintéiseoir: A Multidialectical TTS Application for Irish
Authors: Mícheál Mac Lochlainn
Abstract: This paper details the development of a multidialectical text-to-speech application, 'Sintéiseoir', for the Irish language. This work is being carried out in the context of Irish as a lesser-used language, where learners and other L2 speakers have limited direct exposure to L1 speakers and speech communities, and where native sound systems and vocabularies can be seen to be receding even among L1 speakers - particularly the young.
Sintéiseoir essentially implements the diphone concatenation model, albeit expanded to include phones, half-phones and, potentially, other phonic units. It is based on a platform-independent framework comprising a user-interface, a set of dialect-specific tokenisation engines, a concatenation engine and a playback device.
The tokenisation strategy is entirely rule-based and does not refer to dictionary look-ups. Provision has been made for prosodic processing in the framework but has not yet been implemented. Concatenation units are stored in the form of WAV files on the local file system.
Sintéiseoir's UI provides a text field that allows the user to submit a grapheme string for synthesis, and a prompt to select a dialect. It also filters input to reject graphotactically invalid strings, restrict input to alphabetic and certain punctuation marks found in Irish orthography, and ensure that a dialect has, indeed, been selected.
The UI forwards the filtered grapheme string to the appropriate tokenisation engine. This searches for specified substrings and maps them to corresponding tokens that themselves correspond to concatenation units.
The resultant token string is then forwarded to the concatenation engine, which retrieves the relevant concatenation units, extracts their audio data and concatenates them in a new unit, which is then forwarded to the playback device.
The terms of reference for the initial development of Sintéiseoir specified that it should be capable of uttering, individually, the 99 most common Irish lemmata in the dialects of An Spidéal, Músgraí Uí Fhloínn and Gort a' Choirce, which are internally consistent dialects within the language's three broad dialectical continua of, respectively, Connacht, Munster and Ulster. Audio assets to satisfy this requirement have already been prepared, and have been found to produce reasonably accurate output. The tokenisation engine is, however, capable of processing a wider range of input strings and, when required concatenation units are found to be unavailable, returns a report via the user interface.
Keywords: Irish, TTS, speech synthesis, dialect

Main topic: Catering for Less Widely Used and Taught Languages in CALL

Biodata: Mícheál Mac Lochlainn completed a Master of Science degree by research, for which Sintéiseoir formed the basis, at University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2008. His areas of interest include speech synthesis, CALL in the context of lesser-used language learning, and digital archiving.
Type of presentation Paper presentation

Paper category Research & Development

Target educational sector Further education

Language of delivery English

EU-funded project No

Schedule:	2009-09-12 (12:00 - 12:45) Parallel Session 6 (Room A-25)
Title:	Sintéiseoir: A Multidialectical TTS Application for Irish
Authors:	Mícheál Mac Lochlainn
Abstract:	This paper details the development of a multidialectical text-to-speech application, 'Sintéiseoir', for the Irish language. This work is being carried out in the context of Irish as a lesser-used language, where learners and other L2 speakers have limited direct exposure to L1 speakers and speech communities, and where native sound systems and vocabularies can be seen to be receding even among L1 speakers - particularly the young. Sintéiseoir essentially implements the diphone concatenation model, albeit expanded to include phones, half-phones and, potentially, other phonic units. It is based on a platform-independent framework comprising a user-interface, a set of dialect-specific tokenisation engines, a concatenation engine and a playback device. The tokenisation strategy is entirely rule-based and does not refer to dictionary look-ups. Provision has been made for prosodic processing in the framework but has not yet been implemented. Concatenation units are stored in the form of WAV files on the local file system. Sintéiseoir's UI provides a text field that allows the user to submit a grapheme string for synthesis, and a prompt to select a dialect. It also filters input to reject graphotactically invalid strings, restrict input to alphabetic and certain punctuation marks found in Irish orthography, and ensure that a dialect has, indeed, been selected. The UI forwards the filtered grapheme string to the appropriate tokenisation engine. This searches for specified substrings and maps them to corresponding tokens that themselves correspond to concatenation units. The resultant token string is then forwarded to the concatenation engine, which retrieves the relevant concatenation units, extracts their audio data and concatenates them in a new unit, which is then forwarded to the playback device. The terms of reference for the initial development of Sintéiseoir specified that it should be capable of uttering, individually, the 99 most common Irish lemmata in the dialects of An Spidéal, Músgraí Uí Fhloínn and Gort a' Choirce, which are internally consistent dialects within the language's three broad dialectical continua of, respectively, Connacht, Munster and Ulster. Audio assets to satisfy this requirement have already been prepared, and have been found to produce reasonably accurate output. The tokenisation engine is, however, capable of processing a wider range of input strings and, when required concatenation units are found to be unavailable, returns a report via the user interface.
Keywords:	Irish, TTS, speech synthesis, dialect
Main topic:	Catering for Less Widely Used and Taught Languages in CALL
Biodata:	Mícheál Mac Lochlainn completed a Master of Science degree by research, for which Sintéiseoir formed the basis, at University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2008. His areas of interest include speech synthesis, CALL in the context of lesser-used language learning, and digital archiving.
Type of presentation	Paper presentation
Paper category	Research & Development
Target educational sector	Further education
Language of delivery	English
EU-funded project	No