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Each session includes the presentation of one or two papers, followed by a discussion about at least one item presented in the papers. Some discussions will refer to items from several previously presented papers.
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Q: if a word is homophone and homograph, what would be the hierarchy. In dewanagery the word "kurl" is "hand", also "do". Spelling is the same, meaning different. Which would you take care first.
Paolo: don't care. If pronunciation is the same, then the TTS will say it right. It's at another level, that of the semantic Web (outside of the workshop)
Nixon: but the answer is right there.
Paolo: nothing prevents a lexicon with 2 entries: same graphemes, same pronunciation but different "role". We'll talk about this problem in the relevant sections.
Q: Why not use SAMPA for phonetic alphabet
Paolo: IPA is something you can reference. SAMPA has many variants, and even some companies has their own. IPA is difficult to write but at least it's one alphabet that tries to cover all sounds
Max: what script Tag for Japanese?
Richard: not sure how that works.
Anna: for Greek, it would be interesting for Ancient Greek?
Richard: would be interesting indeed. But for modern greek, that would be not needed.
Q: people sometimes tend to abuse that, e.g. in Greek, they write in latin scripts in SMS, and don't use diacritics.
A: Poles do that too, in the case of Polish, it's not "real" Polish
Kazuyuki: difference between Scottish English and Irish or Welsh
Richard: dialects
Nixon: we need to come up with a breakdown of dialects, how do we register them
Richard: register with IANA
Dan: IANA allows you to create registries and specify how to add values (who's responsible).
E.g. Top Level Domain Names, MIME types, character sets.
Topics include: tones, dialects & styles, schwa deletion
Perpsective for the Local Language Speech Technology Initiative - provide tools for languages in non developed countries - KiSwahili (whole East Africa 20 million) - isiZulu (South Africa - government sponsor african languages) - Hindi - non developed countries not access to PC info from mobile phones (cheap) also Internet access - Many kiosks - Huge number of illiterate people - There are business opportunities in these countries - kiSwahili - services in Kenia and Tanzania - isiZulu - Kiosk in South Africa - Hindi - info to book railway tickets Decomposition of words into constituents
Topics include: syllables, loan words, <dialect>
- Nature of Indian language scritps
- Issues across TTS rendering in all languages
Speech Language Technology Lab @ Bhrigus
- Playing leadership role
- 10 members and advisors
3 PhDs + 4 Masters
- initiating SSML and VXML chapters in India
Nature of Indian languages
- basic units of the writing system are AKsharas
- Aksharas is syllabic in nature
forms are V, CV, CCV, CCCV
- always ends with a vowel (or nasalized vowel)
in written form
- ~1652 dialects/native languages
- 22 languages officially recognized
Convergence of IL Script
- Aksharas are syllabic in nature
- Common Phonetic base
- Share common set of speech sounds across all
language
0 Fairly good
- Each Indian languages (IL) has its own script
- All share common phonetic base
- Non tonal
How to represent Indian lanugage Scripts
- Unicode
Useful for rendering the Indian
- not suitable for keying
- not suitable to build modules sucg as text-normalization
- Itrans-3 / OM - A transliteration scheme by IISc Bangalore
India and Carnegie Moellon University
- useful for "Keying-in and store" the scripts of Indian
language using QWERTY keyboards
- useful processing and writing modules/rules for
letter-to-sound, text normalization etc.
Issues in TTS rendering in IL
- TTS should be able to pronounce words as AKshara
- Lanugages have heavy influence
- <phoneme alphabet="itrans-3" ph=" ">
but
<syllable alphabet="itrans-3" syl="naa too">...
- Motivation for Loan Word <alien>
- BANK has to be pronounced as /B/ /AE/ /N/ /K/
- /AE/ phoneme
Dialect Element
- To load language rules
Conclusions:
- proposed: <syllable>, <alien>, <dialect>
understand the troubles Dan: This come in another workshop - Distinguish written and spoken language - there is new version of RFC3066bis - is that sufficient or separate markings? Joshi: In Indian languages 16 standard languages + 3 more languages - they are spoken, not written Nixon: trade off active implementation perspective, very inefficient load resources Ouyama: Similar problem in Arabic - component text-to-phoneme - in syllables are too many, diphones to save PB: - try to clarify different ways in SSML today: - phoneme - lexicon with possible extensions to deal with ambiguities: - token role -> lexicon - token xml:lang GezaN: - not for engine developers, but for application developers - dialect or languages are the same, if different you need a different engine - proposal from Univ. Hung Chris: - we have this discussion because IL share the same phoneme - if big difference, create a new engine Dan: is xml:lang enough? Nixon: Yes Richard: - xml:lang is the text processing directive it is the content of the element - there is need of other directives for other activities like loading lexicons, changing voices, etc. Dan: - kick off discussion xml:lang is doing two purposes add a new attribute like "speak-as" to specify the target language - SSML 1.1 will discuss the new xml:lang to understand if a single attribute is enough or a second one is better
Topics include: speaking-style, syllable structure, phoneme language, parts of speech, phonetic alphabet for Solvenian, foreign text
Topics include: interpret as, <token>
Paolo: Loquendo prefers "token", a term not too linguistically marked.
Dan: I agree. We've had interesting related discussions regarding Chinese. I've heard
3 issues in all:
- unit demarcation, unit might be word, token, morpheme, syllable, phonemes, mora.
- unit activities: change pronunciation, emphasize, timing, stress volume (phoneme element today)
- link to lexicon: token is used so that there's a tie to lexicon. SRGS has tokens, which
are tied to lexicons. There has to be linkage that's clearly understood between SSML and PLS
Nixon: SISR?
Dan: SISR is a separate processing step. The first is to match the sounds to words, the second
is to map words to meaning ("coke" and "coca-cola" both map to coca-cola). SISR is used to
setup this mapping.
Paolo: if we know if it's an SMS, it helps because you can have many acronyms ('mtfbwy'). ASR
shares similar problems. But in SRGS there is already <token> for things similar to this.
e.g. "New York" has corticulation: better to keep together so you mark it up as
<token>New York</token> in SRGS.
Geza Kiss: Chinese word boundary detection is important.
Dan: yes, we talked about it in the group. The Chinese don't care about the element name
(word, token), they just need it.
Chris: Question is do we delegate a lot of responsability to the TTS?
Can we assume TTS can handle SMS script? Also, it's very useful
to combine POS with inflected languages. This additional information
is useful. Finally, about emotional. About italian within English,
Paolo: SMS, emotions are for later discussion. Right now we want to
talk about word segmentation. for languages, we have to draw a
line otherwise we're going to redefine the whole of SSML. What
we offer are a few ways of changing the English if it doesn't
well. SSML 2 may go beyond that.
Jerneja: with respect to token/word, it's very important to have PoS for highly
inflected languages.
Raghunath: phoneme/morpheme/word/sentence. The word has to be splitted
in some way. So it token similar to morpheme?
Paolo: yes, similar to morpheme and other things. Phoneme is a piece of something but
this something is different according to the language.
Raghunath: but morpheme has semantic bearings
Paolo: either we do line morpheme which has a precise and technical meaning. Or we go for something
practical: an element with no precise definition but which works for splitting words.
Geza Nemeth: an attribute to <token>. InChinese, you have to
differentiate prosodic, pronunciation unit.
Ksenia: can you add tones for African languages to token?
Paolo: yes, that was a proposal from the Chinese participants. Token
is decomposition with characterisation.
Dan: we may put features in SSML which we leave half-specified and
flexible, but we do have to know the linkage with the lexicon,
even if the lexicon entries are not well-defined either. What's
most important for the Chinese turned out that using an alphabet
that's syllable-based did most of the work. Here the concern is different:
what do we want to do with the segmentation offered.
Geza Kiss: a token cannot mean a syllable. SSML says so.
Dan: yes, if you have a one-word syllable, then yes. Otherwise no. To
me token means word, except I don't want to say word, because of
some languages.
Paolo: you're saying: we're missing <token>, and <phoneme> could change semantics.
Oumayma: you map the phoneme from the mother language: do you have look-up
tables to map phonemes? Have you done statistical analysis?
Davide: each language is a table of phoneme, and we have a patented
algorithm that does the mapping, based on linguistic
classification. We do it for all 18 languages we support.
Kazuyuki: about Japanese tokenization processing. Japanese word is
morpheme: not only grapheme, but PoS. Second problem is that
there are many compound words in Japanese [shows example on
whiteboard: /ura niwa / niwa / niwa / niwa tori / ga
iru/. That's a problem for Japanese TTS, which have to do
analysis. Japanese lexicons have both separate and compound
entries.
Paolo: so useful to tokenize?
Kazuyuki: yes, for separate and compound
Paolo: se recursive token
Geza Nemeth: not compatible with SSML 1.0
Dan: in SSML1.0, all examples were ones that where you tried to
override the TTS. So is this particular thing sufficient to fix
the processors: what's the minimal thing we need to do. In this
case, would one level of tokenization is sufficient?
Raghunath: quick comment on whiteboard. In sanskrit there are many
compound words. Gives example ("Arun-Udei"?) with
corticulation.
Dan: that example is in any language? [says "Idnstrd" for "I don't
unstertand]. A TTS may be smart, but may not be able to tokenize
everything.
Ksenia: in African tonal languages, you may need several level of tokens
Geza Nemeth: 1. upward compatibility with SSML 1.0? 2. I think there should
be a subdivision of token, otherwise it's a mess. 3. SSML could
be used after semantic analysis from text, to be passed to
synthesizer.
Dan: there was an example given in Chinese: a poem which, according to
where the boundary was, meant one thing or the opposite.
Max: so the ambuguity exists for humans too. Should SSML do better? guess?
Dan: the engine that generates the SSML necessarily adds semantic
information in any case.
Paolo: there is the problem of backwards compatibility and scalability
for the future versions. You'll want more than <token> so will
add lots of new elements.
Przemyslaw: in arabic TTS, tokenize text is also important, then
vocalize. One level of tokenizing is enough.
Oumayma: Arabic is a syllabic language, so do you rely on this fact ?
Przemyslaw: in order to vocalize/vowelize, we need token markup. It's easier.
Oumayma: I don't agree. Is he working on the signal or on the text. On
the signal, I disagree, on text: a whole word can be a
collection of phonemes, so it's easier to tokenize.
MAJOR POINTS:
- unit demarcation (approximately word-level and below, i.e. not
subphrases of a sentence): unit might be word, token, morpheme,
syllable, phonemes, mora. We agree it's important and <token> might
be a good short-term solution.
- unit-level processing: change pronunciation, emphasize, timing,
stress volume (phoneme element today)
- link to lexicon: token is used so that there's a tie to
lexicon. SRGS has tokens, which are tied to lexicons. There has to
be linkage that's clearly understood between SSML and PLS.
If the token is at the word level then it can be marked as another language.
- token and xml:lang
Dan: Do you need lower than Word-level language identification?
Geza Nemeth: in German or agglutinative language. Compound words with
different pronunciation requirements.
Richard: again, it's the question of what a word is. "teburu-ni-wa"
is one word? It has English and Japanese.
Topics include: IPA and phonetic model
Model for Multilingual communication (textual/verbal) Deshnanagari - a common script for all Indian languages Multilingual happenings - social events in Mumbai Non semantic - Sound Poems Collaborative research on notation system for Indian music with Dr. Ashok Ranade Manual typographic activity for many years (syllabic breaks and meaning breaks) Indian Oral tradition had a long history Veda families from Oral → Text → Phonetics → Grammar Definition of Phoneme (Vamas) Vowel - Consonants Definition of Phonemes (2000 B.C.) Formation of articulate sounds and mode Speech Related Issues Indus Signs Brahmi script Consonant sound + Vowel sound renderings in different scripts + accent marks rendering of Vedic Sanskrit Concept of InPho - Correlation with IPA - Proposal of phonemic codes Range of IPA InPho Issues IPA Issues Position Statement Concrete Text ↔ Stylistic speech Formatted Text ↔ Synthetic Speech Simple Text ↔ Monotone Speech Conclusion:
Ksenia: Include Schwa in SSML text, instead of
complex processing
Richard: In English you need to use the lexicon
for everything
Ksenia: Not possible enumerate for highly inflected
languages
Richard: Hindi is present
Ksenia: It is an issue to eliminate or not.
Przem: Also in Polish, it is not a solution even if
it can help.
Joshi: All the Indian languages are based on Sanskrit
Add phoneme together
Nixon: In the languages we have done, they are solved
by additional Schwa
Dan: Similar issue of what occurs on Hebrew.
SSML is to mark text an human can read. If the processor
has a problem an alternative pronunciation is given.
Richard: If you look Hebrew and Arabic is more and more,
Hindi is much less. For SSML you let the processor to
do more. If you can do that, you need to do that.
Nixon: What we did was exactly that, create a dictionary
and then
Paolo: On defence of IPA
- It is one way of writing pronunciations, many
drawbacks: difficult to type, to read, but part of
the problem is that
Dan: At first I strongly disagree with Paolo.
Many people do not like IPA, especially in China,
it is taught in school to children. Is easy to type.
Richard: Totally agree from Dan and Paolo.
But even for Chinese if you need allophones you will
use IPA.
Back to Schwa, if there are morphological rules?
Ksenia: If there is a morphological boundary one rule,
if not another rule.
Richard: If you add a "virama" sign, you will give the
missing information.
Dan: If there is a way in the script to adjust the text.
It could be done manually or by pre-processing.
There could be concerns for Accessibility to do this.
(Discussion on Bhrigus in Indian)
Ksenia: Why you have <sub>?
Dan: it is a facility.
Chris: IPa is useful as a common ground. You can create
a resource. Prescribe to use other alphabet, but give
a presence.
Richard: This is way you have markup. You can add the
metadata to describe the difference. [...]
Dan: I was thinking to create a registry for alphabet.
With a process to create an alphabet.
This will be discussed in the group.
Kazuyuki: We will continue this discussion in the further
topics tomorrow.
Topics include: fallback language, language mappings, preprocessor, multilingual
Topics include: token element, missing diacritics, word stress
Ksenia: african languages?
Kimmo: we probably support Zulu and Afrikaans, but they're not
available before the UI supports does, and currently S60 phones
don't have it. But a political decision is that all UI
languages are supported
Nixon: footprint of ASR?
Kimmo: about 200 KB, TTS engine is 20-30 KB + language data
Richard: spoken vs written languages?
Kimmo: processor wouldn't change the voice, but would do their best
Max: basically what Davide sugested
Paolo: element or attribute?
Kimmo: as long as it's understandable, and that the requirements are fulfilles
Géza: could use say-as with lexicons for that. There could be 2 layers
of lexicons, one provided by TTS engine provider, one by application
developer. Helpful to be in the standard in some way. However I'm afraid
about the same lexicon for ASR and TTS.
Paolo: we try to accommodate both ASR and TTS needs in PLS lexicon.
The user would be used for very few adjustements. In many simple cases,
you want adjustments both in ASR and TTS.
Géza: in ASR, how would you relate the lexicon to the standard grammar?
Paolo: both grammar and ssml have the lexicon element, so you can
refer to one lexicon from both. What's only missing in the
standard, so with PLS we're trying to address that simply
Kimmo: yes, the key here is the standard.
Paolo: about the list of preferred languages, xml:lang doesn't take
more than one, so we would need to have a new attribute.
Richard: for later discussion...
Paolo: can we have more than one attribute in xml:lang? If not, we
need another attribute.
Richard: you could, in principle have multiple values in xml:lang, but
I strongly discourage that, in order to align with other specs.
xml:lang may serve as a default
Kris: xml:lang describes the content, but it should not be overloaded
with additional meaning, giving instructions to the TTS. It should
be another attribute with extra semantics.
Dan: yes, there is a need to distinguish between written and spoken
attributes.
Max: xml:lang would then be not used
Paolo: no, we need both as hints to the TTS. Today isn't clear.
Géza: suggest <voice lang="...">...</voice>
Oumayma: you can create a synthesizer for all languages, and SSML should support that.
Przemysław: it's very hard
Géza: don't forget the problem with "unknown"
Paolo: just checked, and found that xml:lang is required on <speak>. I suppose
that "unknown" would be handled with no xml:lang
GézaK: doesn't work with subparts that we want to mark unknown.
Richard: xml:lang could be empty "", it may mean "unknown" or "this is not a language", not sure.
ISO-639 has an "unknown" tag, I should check. In principle you can have unknown anyway.
Dan: whichever way, then if there is an existing way, then we can use it
GézaK: worth mentioning in the spec, though.
Kazuyuki: language specification can affect both SSML and PLS. Is it interesting to
specify separately in PLS, i.e. select PLS.
GézaK: each PLS has one language, so there could be a selection
according to the language specified in the SSML instance.
Richard: but lexicons are specified at the top of the SSML document.
e.g. <speak xml:lang="en"> The French word for chat is
<xml:lang="fr">chat</xml:lang></speak>
Paolo: you can have 2 lexicons after <speak>: english.pls and
French.pls. Problem is that the engine has to load both to know
the lexicon languages. [dan reads from SSML spec about
lexicons]
GézaK: if there isn't a French "chat" in the lexicon, then you should
use the English "chat"
Dan: if you had en-GB and en-US in the lexicon, which one do I use if
I get lang="en" ? So the matching is not simple. We could specify
on language, but the lower parts (region/dialect) is up to the
processor.
Oumayma: in written text, foreign words can be in italics or
surrounded by quotation marks. That provides hints that
the output may sound strange.
Dan: but not necessarily, e.g. internet, webcast, iPod, etc. in German.
Richard: coming back to question
Nixon: we don't have to be so specific, just a tag marking as "alien"
and let the processor handle it. Going back to "unknown".
Przemysław: you may also find "chat" and in 2 lexicons.
Max: if you have in English: "tonight we're showing <<la vita e bella>> and <<les quatre-cent coups>>".
Do you use different normalisation rules for each foreign language part?
Przemysław: yes.
Chris: arguing for synthesizer to find the best way of pronouncing the
best way to pronounce a word. Easy in Greek, because you can
easily find out foreign words with the scripts.
Dan: just like "foreign"
Richard: doesn't apply to all languages.
Dan: synthesizing: people want to avoid changing voice when they want
to change language. You want a piece to be spoken in some
different way. In what way do you want to be spoken in a
different voice (which could be the same speaker...)
Géza: 3 ways. 1. phonemes, 2. prosody, 3. accent. So far we haven't said anything
about 2, we haven't separated 1 and 2.
Dan: sometimes you don't even want to pronounce film titles, in widely
different languages you'd just translate.
Jerneja: movie titles aren't the best examples: people's names are most important.
You can't skip or translate them.
Topics include: vowel length identification, POS, type of emotion (mainly mentioned in attachments: SSML_A.dpf.pdf, final_Emotion.pdf)
Paolo: What means: Incorporation of the localization module? Module takes written language and adds vowels SSML is unable to work on text fed from news feed or such Nixon: How do you handle syllables? OD: Grapheme to phoneme: provide vowels Then convert to semi syllables Nixon: What are the units you use? OD: diphones Demo of vocalizer, shows that there are multiple possibilities for a number of words/phrases Choice of alternative made by unsupervised learning algorithm
Topics include: pronunciation style, emotion, dialects, pron-source, POS
Paolo: Is Multext-East LRs an standard that is internationally known? We would prefer to use existing standards rather than create ourselves. JZG: not an ISO standard, but developed with fairly wide group of people Chris: Who is the intended user for PLS? Paolo: the application developer - JZG has just mentioned use for internal development - this is a possible extension, but it would be a great deal of work
Paolo: what can SSML (the interface to the TTS engine) do? Do we need special markup? Paolo explains that the SSML can be associated with other preprocessors or the work can be done in the TTS. SSML could be used to pass messages to the TTS. Dan: You can't do anything inside the SSML document - it's a document. But you can say what changes need to be made by a processor. OAD: Vocalization should be incorporated in the TTS. POS markup in SSML would help the vocalization. GezaN: Can you add POS information to 'words'? RI: No, arabic words carry multiple morphs and you need to mark these up to solve the problem Kimmo: Why would you mark up the text rather than just add the vowels? Paolo: The idea is that you can add part of speech to help the vocalisation. OAD: Sometimes text in say a news feed is partially vocalised where ambiguity needs to be avoided. Paolo: So SSML could include information that text is not vocalise or partially vocalise or vocalised. Kazuyuki: I think vocalization is not special processing but text analysis included in TTS. Is the input of vocalization plain text? OAD: Yes Kazuyuki: So vocalization is a module of TTS. Paolo: But you could also preprocess the SSML text. Dan: Main reason for markup in SSML is to direct processing that follows. So either you do the vocalization no your own, or you need some assistance from the author to help with the vocalization. Only thing that seems to have been mentioned so far is morphological markup. We also heard that there may be several morphs in a single word, and that doesn't exist at the moment and I cannot figure out how to make that happen without extensive work. GezaN: That also applies to Hungarian, Slovene and other agglutinative languages. Discussion about whether Arabic and other agglutinative languages are the same wrt POS. OAD: I don't think we need to put markup in SSML for morph. JZG: But surely it can help? Pzremek: But why use markup if you could just add the vowels to the text? Dan explains the distinction between automatically processing text such as news feeds via handcrafting text that will be often reused. Geza: We should conserve the original text and use markup to annotate it. It would be useful to provide markup for POS because it is also useful for prosody and other things. Chris: SSML is not an annotation tool. It won't be used for morphological annotation. If we add more and more information, where do we stop - why not just provide phonetic transcriptions. Dan: SSML is a language of hints only - a processor can actually ignore almost everything specified - almost every TTS vendor has smart TTS processors and may not agree with what other people suggest. Since it is a hint language, we need to consider what kind of hint is useful, on the assumption that the TTS is pretty good most of the time. POS markup (incl gender, case, etc) was not implemented because of the difficulty of working out what the labels should be. Perhaps we can provide a mechanism for people to annotate the way they want. It's useful for people who don't know phonetic alphabets but do know the POS info, and another group that..... One of the best examples is numbers - needs to match in gender, case, etc. TTS needs to respond and knows you are talking about pencils or tables, and you could tag the number to say what the gender etc is. Maybe in the future we will be able to standardise POS, but it's probably too early right now. Nixon: Is it important to keep the original text when vocalising? Agreed to talk about that later. GezaN and Dan: Summary: There is some interest in trying to standardise at least a subset of the possible values. There is broad interest in enabling labelling. JZG: There may be some ISO work going on in this area. Paolo: We'd be very interesting to find out about that, because we can't handle this ourselves. Kazuyuki: JEITA people suggested in Japanese TTS POS is useful but it is not used in input info for TTS, but Ruby is used. Dan: It's still not clear to us whether ruby needs to be in SSML.
Topics include: inflection, format, details, alias maps
Motivations:
- Greek is heavily inflected languages
nouns, adj, verbs
- Several inflectiona- relato
- How does inflection word
- Inflection attributes are shared between certain
elements in the same context
- Elements might not be neighboring
Inflection definition in Say-as
- provide hints to the synthesis processor
- which inflected version to use?
for: case, number, gender
Ex. number 3
We need context sensitive substitutions
- aliasmap element with inflections
Additional <say-as>
- there is no template for describing the way token
should be rendered
- new major version should address
- two small changes to existing say-as
- use details for date
- use format for pjhone
Say-as Telephone: format
<say-as interpret-as="telephone" format="3223"
details="30">2156664444</sayas>
Say-as Date: details
(Clarifications on the examples)
Paolo: the aliasmap seems to be related to the lexicon Chris: yes, but you need to change to standard Max: the "k" is difficult for lexicon, because you can expand as "kilos" and also "kilometer" Paolo: All of them can stay in the lexicon, you will use the role to reference them, but in this example there is also the inflection. This is a problem for PLS Dan: Is it possible to grasp the inflection from the sentence? Chris: Not simple. Dan: The way was designed is more an "interpret-as". It is not about the rendering. There is not enough information. Richard: if were dealing to news fedd, this kind of markup will be used several time. Can be done in case by case case? Chris: Orthography for numbers is complex and they can be generated from a database. I don't want to do a complex as a pre-processing. Richard: The issue is if the say-as useful for doing this? Przem: We don't know the number of e-mails. Paolo: I agree this is difficult to be done on lexicon. Dan: Why not to use the lexicon? Paolo: Because there is a number "3 k." and you cannot put all the numbers in the lexicon Dan: Ok. Max: If you go in that direction also the example of read for Russian will expand in very large number Paolo: You are right, but a general solution for highly inflected and generative languages is for a future version. We would like to discuss Richard/Dan: Relation of context and numbers in Japanese and Russian. You cannot pronounce unless there is the number. Oumayama: Explanation of variation of gender and case for numbers. Dan: Say-as is a tricky element for many reasons. SSML really does not need say-as, because it is a way to convey a semantic category. Everybody like "date", but "cardinal" seemed to be minor for many languages. This requires a separate effort for say-as, because too big. Chris: Returns on the point of NMTOKEN to CDATA to include values like details="blah?param1=xxx&" Dan: We need to answer what we want to accomplish. Discussion on telephone number reading: New use case: When you say a phone number you may not want to use the normal grouping for that country for understandability. Example for a greek person an US number is read in a certain way (discussion on Dan's questions) Ksenia: Introduce spelling? Chris: is already in the W3C Note called "character" Paolo: The real issue is if we want to restart this activity and if there are enough people interested in it. The current situation is not clean for the standard. Dan: I agree with Paolo. Richard: The question I have is how can i do spelling in Arabic and Indian. Oumayma: We have 28 letters, we spell them. We say the name of the letter "a", "b" (not /bi/). We do not pronounce short vowels in spelling. The spelling is describing how it looks in the paper. Richard: What about Indian languages? Prof. Joshi: Example spell: W3C. No plural, but "doubleyou three ci" Description of phonemes. Richard: Ex. spelling "kamra" (that means "room") Joshi/Nixon: In Hindi the syllables are pronounced but if the people will not understand the single phoneme will be pronunced.
Remaining topics, with count of interest
* specialized content (SMS, email) : 11 GezaN: problem is that it would be very useful to be able to find the characters that the network is supporting. Synthesizer may generate differently with character set. Also SMS should be part of say as. Also link to pronunciation lexicon. Przemysław: SMS centers cut diacritics Max: if xml:lang="pl" and encoding="us-ascii" and style="sms" => then infer diacritics GezaN shows example: diacritics are removed, but sometimes only some of them
* speaking style: 8 Ksenia: it's science-fiction at this stage. So many parametersneeded. GezaK: we already have speaking-style="casual" Paolo: the values are difficult to define. Open list? Max: is it generating the style voice, or the values? Paolo: you can have a specific database for a style. Up to the processor if it has a news style. Maybe change voice. Ksenia: don't think that's up for standardisation. Paolo: it is a way of addressing the problem, it is possible to customise your TTS. SSML doesn't let you specify to accuse Ksenia: never heard one with good speaking style GesaN: they exist. Oumayma: about style synthesis, you add that later Max: language tags? RFC 3066? Richard: not appropriate a language Raghunath: speaking style is important. There's a parallel to handwriting style.
* Stress marking: 6 Przemysław: best quality TTS has special signs for stress indicators. There's no ways to do that right now, and you have to use IPA Dan: that's something you could use a lexicon for, and a phoneme. Would a different alphabet be a solution? In Chinese, pinyin allows specifying tone? Przemysław: one character would be enough. Maybe 2. Paolo: not SSML's job to standardise stress markup Dan: perhaps because many TTS stress differently, so they market differently. It's not clear how you would want to standardize. IPA has first and second stress. Przemysław: but not practical GezaK: can use <sub> Dan: wondering is the issue is standardising marking stress, or designing a language. Nixon: agree with fact that features should be left to application. Opens a can of worms how many ways to do it. Chris: there's IPA and alternative alphabets instead of IPA. Oumayma: it's all a question of prosody: we can do everything with prosody.
* stronger linkage to PLS: 5 Jerneja: several interfaces where PLS should link to SSML, e.g. PoS, maybe some speaking style (pronouncing a word casually or not).
* Emotions: 4 Oumayma: for emotions we play on 3 prosodic features (amplitude, contour, ??). In SSML, you could put a mark to have phrase or a word to be pronouced happily or angrily, which will result in modifying it's prosody Nixon: Ellen Eide has a good paper on that Dan+Paolo: she's involved and interested! Dan: asks who built a TTS engine and who's comfortable including emotions. result: little bit more than 50%
* making change via orthography or markup: 3 (<sub> or other markup or change the original script)
* metadata: 2
* african tones: 1
Invite experts to the SSML subgroup of the Voice Browser Working Group
to update requirements and develop specifications. VBWG need experts on the issues clarified in this workshop because we only
work on group interest. So we would like to invite experts to the SSML subgroup of
the Voice Browser
Working Group to update requirements and develop specifications. What contribution do you need? Max: If you're non-member: can get public draft, public mailing list, and your comments welcome. every comments will be addressed. If member & VBWG participant: can participate in f2f meetings, telephone conferences,
and can also subscribe internal mailing list. In addition, can participate in all other WG's activity like semantic web. Paolo: there're 2 steps to participate in SSML activity: (1) W3C member and (2) VBWG participants Max: When you become a VBWG participant, Patent Policy agreement is required. Nemeth: I'll check whether my organization is member or not. Paolo: research institute or university should be get a discount. Max: please visit W3C web site:http://www.w3.org/Consortium/joinfor the procedure. And please ask Max and Kaz about the details ;-) Conduct workshop(s) for other languages. Dan: In Beijing, there were contributions from China, Japanese, Korea and Poland. This time, we have many other languages: Greek, Indian, Russian, Arabic, Hungarian, ... What/Where to do next? Ksenia: How about South Africa? Max: Please join us and propose it ;-) Ksenia: Especially localized French or English in South Africa. Nixon: I'd like to suggest India. Richard: Another Workshop (not held by VBWG) will be held at CDAC
in India (=W3C India Office) in August Jerneja: There will be HLT conference Dan: Support for major language family like Slavic is required. Chris: Why not Turkey? Dan: Middle east is important. Paolo: 2 turkeys couldn't participate in this Workshop because of
schedule arrangement and deadline issue. we should have given longer time for participants... Nixon: Is there any local activities? China and india have big market. if there is local chapter, more people are available. WG might be big enough... Max:In fact, this Workshop was originaly planned in Turkey. But changed to Greece because of bird flu. Ksenia: How about Speecon in Russia? oumayma: Is individual membership available? max: People, who should participate because they have knowledge and skill, can
participate in WG as invited experts. Dan: Thank you for your thoughtful suggestions and comments. If nothing else, adjourned.
[Workshop adjourned]
The Call for Participation , the Agenda and the Logistics Information are available.
Jim Larson and Kazuyuki Ashimura, Workshop Co-chairs
Max Froumentin, Voice Activity Lead
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