Text Normalization for Bangla, Khmer, Nepali, Javanese, Sinhala and Sundanese Text-to-Speech Systems

Abstract

Text normalization is the process of converting non-standard words (NSWs) such as numbers, and abbreviations into standard words so that their pronunciations can be derived by a typical means (usually lexicon lookups). Text normalization is, thus, an important component of any text-to-speech (TTS) system. Without text normalization, the resulting voice may sound unintelligent. In this paper, we describe an approach to develop rule-based text normalization. We also describe our open source repository containing text normalization grammars and tests for Bangla, Javanese, Khmer, Nepali, Sinhala and Sundanese. Fi-nally, we present a recipe for utilizing the grammars in a TTS system.