Study and implementation of a weighted finite-state library - application to speech synthesis

Arnaud Adant

5$^{th}$ year in Electrical Engineering
TCTS lab, Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium

Supervisor : Thierry Dutoit

Academic year 1999 - 2000

Aknowledgments

I would like to thank Véronique Bruyère and Thierry Dutoit for having supported this work, Vincent Pagel, Vincent LeMaout, Michel Bagein, Nawfal Tounsi, Bruce Watson, Jan Daciuk, Eric Laporte, Richard Sproat, Gertjan Van Noord and Alan Black for having kindly replied to my electronic messages.

To my parents

To Zhuo Xin

Abstract

Automata theory can be successfully applied to natural language processing. We have tried to identify computational constraints involved in speech synthesis linguistic modules . This lead to a generic extension of ASTL (Automata Standard Template Library)¹ to possibly weighted automata (WFA) and transducers (WFST). Classical and extended algorithms have been implemented with performance and code reusability in mind. This template library is applied to rewrite rule compilation, Viterbi decoding and text disambiguation for which we present an extended algorithm.

KEYWORDS : automates, theories des, C++, transducteurs