Automatic transcription of numerals in inflectional languages

Abstract

In this paper we describe the part of the text preprocessing module in our text-to-speech synthesis system which converts numerals written as figures into a readable full-length form, which could be processed by a phonetic transcription module. The numerals conversion is a significant issue in inflectional language as Czech, Russian or Slovak because morphological and semantic information is necessary to make the conversion unambiguous. In the paper three part-of-speech tagging methods are compared. Furthermore, a method reducing the tagset to increase the numerals conversion accuracy is presented in the paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.