Common Database for Abbreviations, Acronyms, etc.

[Peter Grasch]

Hi Tom?,

On Wed, 2012-09-26 at 12:12 +0200, Tom?? Cerha wrote:
> Dne 24.9.2012 13:12, Peter Grasch wrote:
> > but I'd really like to hear from all of you: Would you be interested in
> > helping to build such a library? If such a library would exist, would
> > you consider using it instead of your current implementation?
> 
> I believe such common library would definitely be a step in the right 
> direction.  The 
> question is, however, at which level of the stack should this library be 
> used.  As this 
> is actualy a text to speech conversion, so a simple answer is, that it 
> belongs to the 
> TTS layer.  The TTS layer is part of every speech synthesizer, so it belongs 
> to the 
> speech synthesizer.  This would be bossible with espeak or Festival, but we 
> get into 
> troubles if we want the same functionality with proprietary speech 
> synthesizers.
I have to disagree on this: For me, a speech synthesizer should "just"
synthesize the given input.
Doing any kind of pre-processing on the input at that layer is, if you
excuse the silly comparison, like a musical instrument that "fixes" the
input because it decides that the melody "wouldn't sound good".

In my opinion, the correct layer for abbreviation expansion or indeed
any kind of pre-processing of the input text would be at the layer of
speech-dispatcher.

Best regards,
Peter