Faking it: Synthetic Text-to-speech Synthesis for Under-resourced Languages – Experimental Design

Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2005, pages 71–77, Sydney, Australia, December 2005. Faking it: Synthetic text-to-speech synthesis for under-resourced languages – Experimental design Harold Somers School of Informatics University of Manchester Manchester, UK Harold.Somers@manchester.ac.uk Abstract Speech synthesis or text-to-speech (TTS) systems are currently available for a number of the world’s major languages, but for thousands of the world’s ‘minor’ languages no such technology is available. While awaiting the development of such technology, we would like to try the stop-gap solution of using an existing TTS system for a major language (the base language) to ‘fake’ TTS for a minor language (the target language). This paper describes the design for an experiment which involves finding a suitable base language for the Australian Aboriginal language Pitjantjajara as a target language, and evaluating its usability in the real-life situation of providing language technology support for speakers of the target language whose understanding of the local majority language is limited, for example in the scenario of going to the doctor. 1. Introduction Speech synthesis systems, in particular text-to- speech (TTS) systems which ‘read out’ ordinary text on the computer, are now fairly widespread and are sufficiently reliable and of a suitable quality for wide acceptance and use. However, this is only true for the ‘major’ languages. For example, Microsoft’s Agent includes American and British English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Scansoft’s RealSpeak provides for all of the above, plus Basque, Cantonese, Mandarin, Danish, two varieties of Dutch, Australian and Indian English, Canadian French, Norwegian, Polish, and two varieties of Portuguese. The list is impressive, but there are still thousands of languages not covered. Our interest is in providing language technology-based support for speakers of ‘minor’ languages1 when they find themselves in situations 1 A ‘minor’ language is any language which is not a where their lack of ability in another language is a significant disadvantage: we have been focusing on the case of newly arrived immigrants seeking healthcare (a visit to the doctor), but the possibilities are almost endless. This is the scenario envisaged by the CANES framework,2 as described by Somers and Lovel (2003) and Somers et al. (2004). This envisages software support for getting general information about healthcare problems, arranging an appointment at the clinic or hospital, understanding information leaflets and instructions regarding treatment and drugs, and of course face- to-face meetings with healthcare providers, notably GPs and nurses. Other projects in this field have focused on spoken language translation (SLT) of the doctor–patient interview (Rayner et al., 2003; Narayanan et al., 2004). We have recognized that, while face-to-face dialogues have an important role in the pathway to healthcare, other means of communication play an equally important role, some of them text-based. In all these cases, we see TTS as an essential technology, particularly for users who not only may have limited or no English, but also whose reading ability in their own language may be poor, whether due to low literacy, dyslexia or visual …

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