Language and speech generation

The paper describes a system that produces spoken monologues derived from information in a database. The sentences of these monologues are generated from templates of syntactic structures, which may contain open slots in which other elements, usually noun phrases, can be inserted. It is shown how these sentences string together to form a coherent message. This message has to be pronounced correctly, which means, among other things, that it has to be prosodically acceptable. The paper indicates how linguistic information is used to arrive at an acceptable prosodic structure, which, in turn, feeds into a module which takes care of the phonetic realization of the monologue