Adapt Mandarin ITS system to Chinese dialect ITS systems

Abstract

This paper deals with how to construct Text To Speech (TTS) systems for Chinese dialects. The proposed method adapts Chinese Mandarin TTS system to dialects TTS systems through representing dialect phonology by Mandarin phonology using phonology mappings, and adding dialect vocabulary in the front end to handle lexical difference. But not all Chinese dialects are suitable for applying this adaptation. Investigations carried out in this paper show that this method can be used to construct TTS systems for the Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Dongbei dialects. Evaluation of such dialect systems are also given in this paper.