A Situational Speech Synthesizer for Yoruba: System Design, Phonological Rule Architecture, and Orthographic Extensions for Contour
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Computer Science > Sound
arXiv:2607.18317 (cs)
[Submitted on 17 Jul 2026]
Title:A Situational Speech Synthesizer for Yoruba: System Design, Phonological Rule Architecture, and Orthographic Extensions for Contour
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Abstract:We present TTSYoruba, a rule-based concatenative diphone speech synthesizer for Yoruba, deployed at online as part of the this http URL open dictionary of Yoruba personal names. The system takes tone-marked Yoruba text as input and produces audio output by applying a hand-crafted phonological rule system to a recorded inventory of 651 diphone units spanning five tonal variants of every consonant-vowel combination in the language. We describe the phonological architecture of the system in detail, including our complete tonal file-selection logic, our treatment of the three-way nasal disambiguation problem (oral /n/, nasalized vowel, and syllabic nasal), and the derivation of contextual rising and falling tones from level-tone input. We also present, as an orthographic contribution, the adoption of the caron and circumflex, which are symbols with prior standing in Yoruba phonological transcription, as standard single-vowel contour tone markers, integrated into the TTS normalization pipeline and the WriteYoruba keyboard input tool. The system's performance was evaluated through a listener study (N=50), with detailed results on Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) presented in Section 6.
Keywords: Yoruba, text-to-speech, low-resource languages, diphone synthesis, contour tones, African language NLP, rule-based synthesis
| Comments: | Currently under review at Speech Communication |
| Subjects: | Sound (cs.SD); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) |
| ACM classes: | I.2.7; H.5.5 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2607.18317 [cs.SD] |
| (or arXiv:2607.18317v1 [cs.SD] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.18317
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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