A multilingual text processing engine for the PAPAGENO text-to-speech synthesis system.

Automatic synthesis of speech from arbitrary text requires two basic operations: linguistic analysis of input text and speech waveform generation. The achieved quality of the second stage very much depends on the reliability and richness of information generated in the first stage. In this paper we discuss possibilities and problems of text analysis for multilingual speech synthesis. The language independent approach requires the separation of all the language specific information into the language specific inventory, which is composed of different lexica, various dictionaries and lists. The remaining core represents the language independent text-processing engine.