Using The Segmentation Corpus To Define An Inventory Of Concatenative Units For Cantonese Speech Synthesis


The problem of word segmentation affects all aspects of Chinese language processing, including the development of text-to-speech synthesis systems. In synthesizing a Hong Kong Cantonese text, for example, words must be identified in order to model fusion of coda [p] with initial [h], and other similar effects that differentiate word-internal syllable boundaries from syllable edges that begin or end words. Accurate segmentation is necessary also for developing any list of words large enough to identify the word-internal cross-syllable sequences that must be recorded to model such effects using concatenated synthesis units. This paper describes our use of the Segmentation Corpus to constrain such units.