Pronunciation Correction via Phoneme Mapping for Cross-Language TTS
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Solution Overview
Problem
Text-to-speech and speech recognition systems face challenges in accurately converting and recognizing text strings across different languages due to differences in pronunciation rules and phonemes, leading to incorrect or unintelligible results when there is a mismatch between the input language and the system's language.
Innovation Solution
The solution involves a pronunciation correction system that searches a word lexicon for matching words, uses locale data to apply letter-to-speech rules if the locale matches, and queries a lexicon service for phoneme mapping if the locale differs, allowing the system to generate or recognize audible forms of words based on the target language's phonemes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a text-to-speech system uses language-specific pronunciation rules and phoneme sets, then the system can accurately process words in its target language, but it cannot correctly convert or recognize words from languages with different phoneme sets and pronunciation rules
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a phoneme mapping service as an intermediary component that bridges the gap between source language phonemes and target language phonemes. When a word is detected as being in a source language different from the TTS system's target language, the phoneme mapping service translates the phoneme representation from the source language to the target language, enabling the system to accurately pronounce words from languages it does not natively support.
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically changes the phoneme representation parameters based on the source language detected in the text string. By identifying the language of the input text and selecting appropriate phoneme mappings from a lexicon, the system adapts its pronunciation parameters to match the source language's phonetic characteristics while using the target language's TTS engine, thus maintaining pronunciation accuracy across multiple languages.
2Productivity
If the system uses a single language's phoneme set for text-to-speech conversion, then the conversion process is simple and efficient, but the system produces incorrect or unintelligible outputs when processing words from different languages
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary language detection and phoneme mapping before the actual text-to-speech conversion. By pre-identifying the source language of the text string and pre-computing the appropriate phoneme mappings from the source language to the target language, the system prepares all necessary translation data in advance. This preliminary action ensures that when conversion occurs, the correct phoneme mappings are already in place, maintaining both efficiency and pronunciation correctness.
3Adaptability or versatility
If the system implements language-specific lexicons and pronunciation rules for each supported language, then the system can handle multiple languages, but the system complexity and data requirements increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates a universal phoneme mapping service that handles multiple language pairs through a single integrated mechanism. Rather than implementing separate TTS engines for each language, the system uses one target language TTS engine and a universal phoneme mapping layer that can translate between any source language phonemes and the target language phonemes. This universal approach enables multi-language support while maintaining a relatively simple system structure.
Solution Approach 2:
The phoneme mapping service acts as a universal intermediary layer between the text processing component and the TTS engine. This single intermediary component handles all language translation tasks by mapping phonemes from various source languages to the target language phoneme set, eliminating the need for separate language-specific processing pipelines and reducing overall system complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
Pronunciation correction for text-to-speech (TTS) systems and speech recognition (SR) systems between different languages is provided. If a word requiring pronunciation by a target language TTS or SR is from a same language as the target language, but is not found in a lexicon of words from the target language, a letter-to-speech (LTS) rules set of the target language is used to generate a letter-to-speech output for the word for use by the TTS or SR configured according to the target language. If the word is from a different language as the target language, phonemes comprising the word according to its native language are mapped to phonemes of the target language. The phoneme mapping is used by the TTS or SR configured according to the target language for generating or recognizing an audible form of the word according to the target language.