Specific features of the Galician language and implications for speech technology development

In this article we present the main linguistic and phonetic features of Galician which need to be considered in the development of speech technology applications for this language. We also describe the solutions adopted in our text-to-speech system, also useful for speech recognition and speech-to-speech translation. On the phonetic plane in particular, the handling of vocal contact and the determination of mid-vowel openness are discussed. On the linguistic plane we place special emphasis on the handling of clitics and verbs. It should be noted that in Galician there is high interrelation between phonetics and grammatical information. Therefore, the task of morphosyntactic disambiguation is also addressed. Moreover, this task is fundamental for a higher level linguistic analysis.