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UDAR

System of speech synthesis

First version: June 1994 Last version: 7.5 1999
Application:  
  Used as a part of speech synthesis systems, and separely for phonetic studies.
Some components such as Phonetic Automatic Transcriber may be used for editing books for children and foreigners.		  
Description:  
  UDAR is a linguistic processor preparing texts for speech synthesis. It performs:  
 
  • Word stress assignment in word forms (stress in the Russian language is not fixed and in a number of cases it is connected with the lexical or grammatical meaning of the word);
  • Text segmentation (by pauses) into syntagms and phrases;
  • Placement of sentence, syntagmatic, and logical stress;
  • Determination of the melodic type for each phrase or its parts;
  • Replacing E by Ë, as Russian orthography traditionally uses one letter for both;
  • Reading abbreviations;
  • Converting numerals, given in the text in the form of figures into words and word combinations;
  • Phonetic transcription of the input text;
  • Description of the text in physical terms including length, frequency and energy of sounds according to the transcription.
 
  The version UDAR 4.51 (1996) was made for RUSVOX and oriented to the diphonic synthesis. However, PSOLA technology is sufficient to reproduce normative pronunciation but is incapable to keep individual speaker’s characteristics. That’s why the development of allophonic synthesis was started. For that UDAR (version 6.1, 1997 and higher) algorithms had to be essentially modified, the dictionary grew from 90,000 words to 160,000, and the number of acoustical contours increased from 7 to 26.  
Languages processed:  
  Russian  
Type of processing:  
  Morphological analysis, resolution of contextual ambiguities, words accentuation by means of a morpho-accentologic dictionary.
Marking pauses and intonation on the basis of selection of syntagmes and syntactic groups.		  
Hardware/software requirements:
  IBM PC compatible, Windows 95/98  
Developer team: Contact person:  
Department for phonetics and methods of teaching foreign languages, SPbGU Igor' V. Zharkov
Phone: (+7 812) 328 95 65
E-mail: igor@IZ2803.spb.edu, paul@phonet.lang.pu.ru