Homograph disambiguation

In both semiotic classification and homograph disambiguation, our goal is to assign a label to each token, where the label is drawn from a pre-defined set. This process is one of classification, which as we shall see, crops up all the time in TTS to the extent that we use a number of basic approaches again and again for various TTS problems. 

Regardless, the general approach is to use one of the token disambiguation techniques described in Section 5.2.1. Here we discuss some of the specifics of homograph disambiguation. 

We can summarise the procedure for building a homograph disambiguation system as follows ... 

The take home message from this discussion is that the theoretical difficulties with prosodic models and the under specification of prosody in text mean that this is an inherently difficult problem and should be approached with a degree of caution. While it is possible to continually drive down the error rate with regard to semiotic classification, homograph disambiguation and so on, it is unrealistic to assume the same can be done with prosody. 

Yarowsky, D. Homograph disambiguation in speech synthesis. In Second ESCA/IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis (1994). 

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