A System for Taiwanese Teaching and Word Collection

Abstract

In this paper we proposed a system for Taiwanese teaching and word collection. The system can translate the input Chinese sentence or word into Taiwanese speech. Also we design a platform through which we can collect words and their pronunciation for Taiwanese lexicon by the help of users and some experts who participated in our project. The collection for words and speech through the collaboration of people is a new experiment. A high quality Text-to-Speech system is required for a system to teach Taiwanese speaking. We improve the quality of Taiwanese TTS system in the following ways: (a) We collect many synthesis units by finding more consonants (20), vowels (100), and tones (9). (b) We modify the general tone sandhi rules for entering tones to get higher intelligibility and naturalness of the synthesized speech. (c) With the help of CFSs, we get a better lexicon for Taiwanese. The output of word segmentation will be more suitable for Taiwanese TTS.