Design and evaluation of a phonological phrase parser for Spanish text-to-speech

This paper presents and evaluates a phonological phrase parser for a Spanish text-to-speech system. The parser consists of three stages: 1) lexical lookup, using a small dictionary (428 words); 2) preliminary phrase boundary placement, using a modification of Liberman and Church’s (1992) function group parser; and 3) readjustment of phrase boundaries, using syllable count and punctuation. A corpus of 382 hand-parsed sentences (1,691 phrases) was used to evaluate the parser. The parser generated almost the same number of phrases (1,692) as the hand-parsed sentences with 70% (1,186) agreement. Suggestions for improving the parser’s performance include the expansion of the verb lexicon, performing simple morphological analysis for verbs, and relaxing the syllable count in phrases before verb forms.