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A Simple Malay Speech Synthesizer Using Syllable Concatenation Approach

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 A Simple Malay Speech Synthesizer Using
Syllable Concatenation Approach
Nur-Hana SAMSUDIN, Sabrina TIUN and TANG Enya Kong
Computer-Aided Translation Unit
School of Computer Sciences
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Penang, Malaysia
{nursham, sab, enyakong}@cs.usm.my

Abstract— A Malay speech synthesizer system will be • concatenative synthesis.

discussed. This paper will cover the available Malay speech
synthesis system, the underlying structure of our system,
brief description of crucial modules, general evaluation of
the system, the proposed enhancement and future work of
Malay text-to-speech system in Computer-Aided Translation
Unit (UTMK). The objective is to highlight how our system
works and how to improve its performance. We would also
enlighten our future paradigm in the text-to-speech
research at UTMK.
Index Terms—Speech Synthesis, syllable concatenation,
Malay Language, distortion.
I. INTRODUCTION
Articulatory synthesis simulates speech base on
human articulators’ movement while formant synthesis
model the pole frequencies of speech signal used to
determine the parameters necessary to synthesize a
desired utterance based on a set of rules. Concatenative
synthesis stores pre-recorded speech segments which
are later retrieved and replayed to produce synthesized
speech.
Type of unit to be stored as pre-recorded speech
segments rely on the developers’ preference and also
the best unit to represent a particular language for the
speech synthesis system. These units can be classified
into two types; context dependent units such as

O ver the last several years, speech technology has

advanced considerably. We can build systems that
interact through speech; which the system can listen to
what was said, compute or do something, and then
speak back, using spoken language generation.
Generally, speech system can be categorized into two
broad categories: speech synthesis and speech
recognition. Generally, speech synthesis is the process
of generating spoken language succession from
arbitrary text whereas speech recognition is the process
of identifying spoken language into required form such
as converts it into text or translate it as command.
Mostly, speech synthesis in Malaysia still revolves
around research level. Different research centre focus
on different speech synthesis approach. For example,
Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology
(APIIT) under Research and Development Team is
developing a visual text-to-speech system, named
AVISS. At Universiti Kebangsaaan Malaysia (UKM)
under Department of Electrical Engineering Faculty of
Engineering, they focus on digital speech synthesis and
here at Computer-Aided Translation Unit (UTMK),
School of Computer Science, Universiti Sains
Malaysia, we focus on pre-recorded speech synthesis.
Three main approaches in speech synthesis system
development are [1]:
• articulatory synthesis;
• formant synthesis; and
phonemes, syllables and words; and also context
independent units such as diphone, triphone and
demisyllable [2]. Other representation will be unit
selection database. For this type of database, there will
be different type of unit available in the database and
there will be a few instances for an utterance [3].
In this paper, we will emphasize on concatenative
synthesis using syllables unit.First of all, we will give
an overview of the available Malay speech synthesis
system, our Malay Speech Synthesizer; which includes
the architecture, methods of the modules development
and the performance of the system. We will also
discuss how the development of the system can help to
improve our technique in solving the synthesis
problems and our future plan in UTMK.
II. BACKGROUND
A. Existing Malay Synthesizer using Syllable
Concatenation
A variety of Malay speech synthesis by
concatenation system has been proposed. For example,
in Say It! system [4], the segmenting technique is to
select the longest phoneme sequence and compare the
selected sequence in the available syllable database. If
matches occur, the sequence will be taken out and
consider as a syllable unit. Else, the last phoneme in the
sequence will be eliminated and the comparison will be shown in Figure 1.
done again with the reduced phonemes sequence. The
process will be repeated until the match is found in the
database. This technique does provide a simple
Raw Text
implementation and produced quick result but the
parsing could also be segmented wrongly [4]. Abbreviation,
acronym and
Text Normalization
In another synthesizer implementation [5], the whole symbol
system was implemented by adapting a previously dictionary
developed Arabic synthesizer system. The technique of Malay
Syllable Parser
segmentation has considered the linguistic analysis and Database
phonetic analysis of standard Malay sound systems plus
Malay loan words from Arabic. The approach they used
Syllable Concatenation Syllable
was by comparing the structure of the syllables. The Database
proposed approach uses three syllables structure in
Malay Language as the basis of segmentation. This
syllables structure is base on the consonants and vowels Synthesized Speech
sequence:
• CV Figure 1: Malay Speech Synthesizer Architecture
• CVC [6]
• VC
The phonetic transcription will be tagged in consonant- Raw Text is the input of the system. Any typed text
vowel label. The syllable segmentation will be done will be normalized in Text Normalization Module.
base on the matching structure of Malay syllable Syllable Parser will segment the normalized text to
structure that has been stated above. Base on the test syllable unit according to Malay rules. Syllable
executed, the system has proven its ability to produce concatenation will combine syllable unit sound file to
an acceptable result [5].
produce a synthesized speech.

B. Malay Speech Synthesizer Architecture III. SYLLABLE CONCATENATION APPROACH

Here in UTMK, we have implemented systems by
adapting modules to the existing synthesizer engines
which developed for other language (American English
and Indonesian) and we also have developed our own
speech synthesis system using our own speech
synthesizer engine. We found that adapting a system
using other language synthesizer engine will cause the
synthesized speech to sound foreign. Hence it is
important for us to have our own synthesizer1 as a
starting point to have a robust speech synthesis engine.
It is only a preliminary stage of Malay Speech
Synthesizer development in UTMK. This exploratory
study has uncovered the problems arise during the
development of the synthesizer. It help us realized
things that need to be considered to produce a good
speech synthesizer, such as in the phonetic analysis
context and linguistic analysis context as well as the
synthesizer approach itself. It has also opened the door
to future enhance and implement a better and robust
system.
The architecture of our system may be presented as
1
The system name is Malay Speech Synthesizer. Developed
between 2002 to 2003 by Nur-Hana Samsudin and Morshidah Yazid.
Malay Speech Synthesizer system was implemented
using C++ and Visual Basic. Our Malay Speech
synthesizer is using concatenative approach with
syllables unit. There are three different stages to
produce a synthesized speech
A. Text Normalization
The inputted text may not only contain words. There
could be other different type of character such as
numbers, abbreviation and acronyms which we
considered as symbol in this system. This module will
convert the symbols input into readable text.
B. Syllable Parser
Syllable Parser functioned to extract syllables from
each normalized words and arranged it according to the
sequence of the syllables based on Malay phonological
rules. According to Malay Speech Synthesizer
implementation [6] there are 4 syllable structures in
Malay Sound System. There are
• CV
• VC
 • CVC IV. SYSTEM PERFORMANCE
• V
Although structures are already available, the From our rules, syllable segmentation has shown
synthesizer might still not able to segment all words acceptable results. These are an example of
correctly. This is because there are a lot of loan words segmentation done for different types of words in
in Malay vocabulary. The origins of those loan words Malay language.
are also varied such as English, Arabic, Sanskrit, Indian
and Javanese. To make sure the system will also be • Malay origin word
able to segment loan words correctly, we have applied Word: belalang ‘grasshopper’
a set of rules to make sure that as much loan word Parser converter:
could be segmented correctly as possible and of course, CVCVCVC (<ng> is bound as one;
it must also correctly segment all Malay words. /ŋ/)
This module has a few sub-modules to ensure the Parser segmenter:
desired output is produced. These are some of the sub- CV. CV. CVC.
modules and the short description of the sub modules: Synthesizer:
/bə/ + /la/ + /laŋ/
1) ParseSequence: This sub module will receive the
input text as a string of characters and convert the
• English loan word
string into consonant or vowel symbol.
Word: struktur ‘structure’
Parser converter:
2) PronounceAI: Since we do not have morphology
CCCVCCVC
analyzer, we have to distinguish the suffixes of <i> in a
Parser segmenter:
word. We have a collection of words which end with
CCCVC. CVC.
<ai> that is pronounced as a diphthong and not
Synthesizer:
separately pronounce as in /a/ + /i/.
/struk/ + /tur/
3) ParseSyllabification: syllable segmentation module
is implemented here. • Arabic loan word
Word: maghrib ‘when the sun falls in the
4) ParseDiphtong: This module will bind all Malay horizon’
diphthong in one unit vowel. Malay diphtongs are: Parser converter:
<ai>, <au> and <oi>. CVCCVC (<gh> is bound as one; /ɣ/)
Parser segmenter:
5) ConvertEnd: If there are sequence of <ai>, <au>, CVC. CVC.
<ia>, <iu>, <ua> and <ui> in a word, which is parsed Synthesizer:
into different syllable, <w> or <y> need to be inserted /maɣ/ + /rib/
as how the Malay phonological rules has stated. This is
also known as glides insertion. Segment concatenation has also produced
reasonably intelligible synthetic speech. However,
distortion still occurs between concatenate segments
C. Syllable Concatenation and hence implementing wave modification to
handle the distortion is one of the options to have
This module will receive a list of syllable segment more natural speech. Based on the informal
that has been properly arranged according to the raw perceptibility test, it is easy to determine what is
text. Base on the list of syllable, Syllable Concatenation being said if the input are words and short sentences.
module will concatenate the sound according to the However, spoken text is harder to comprehend when
sequence and finally play the sound which we know as the text is in paragraph length. This perceptibility
synthesized speech. difficulty is more significant without the prosody
The system is capable of doing Malay language text modification algorithm.
conversion into Malay “baku” synthesized speech. It
should also capable of segmenting syllable of non-loan V. IMPROVING THE SYNTHESIZER
words and loan words.
Indeed, developing this preliminary system
enabled us to discover the criteria that need to pay
attention to [6], especially during the analysis and
 design of the system. These are the proposed
improvement.
Firstly, a thorough phonetic analysis needs to be
done. Since we would like to make the system able
to speak all type of Malay words, we have to study
the phonological rules for both Malay words and
loan words and have to make sure it can adapt in the
system well.
Secondly, formal grapheme-to-phoneme
conversions need to be done at the early stage of the
development to avoid chaos in the system
implementation. This is also important to make sure
the design is well structured and can easily
reengineer later.
Another thing is that, the synthesizer must have
additional module which is the smoothing algorithm.
Smoothing is important to ensure that the
concatenation between syllables has as small
distortion as possible and also to ensure the
mismatches between words are lessen as much as
possible.
We also need to re-record speech segments. More
attention needs to be paid to the frequency and
amplitude range as well as the duration of each pre-
recorded segments. This is important to ensure only
slight modification is necessary to apply to the wave
or else it will cause other distortion problems. It is
also important to choose the right environment such
as the recording room and also the equipment use for
recording to increase the sound quality.
Each of the improvement plans is in parallel
process in UTMK and currently ongoing.
VI. FUTURE WORK
In UTMK, we have a prototype engine which the
unit for concatenative synthesis are phonemes.
Compared the quality of the results, the syllable is
indeed produced better results. However, with no wave
modification, the distortion will occur and this may
lead to low natural quality and perhaps low
intelligibility speech. On the other hand, if we
implement wave modification algorithm, the distortion
will still occur. The main point is, once the waveform is
modified, the distortion will exist. It is just the matter of
how significant the distortion is to human
perceptibility. If the modified sound’s value range, such
as the pitch sound is not much differ from the original
pitch value, than the distortion is not very significant
(assuming other modified attribute is corresponded
with the original sound properly).
Realizing these facts, we are going to implement
another concatenative synthesizer approach using unit
selection database as its unit. They will be a few
candidates of the same utterance with different
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parameter values and different type of units such as
phonemes and syllables. This approach is still in
research level now.
VII. CONCLUSION
A simple Malay speech synthesizer using syllables
unit was presented. The quality of the synthesized
speech is reasonably intelligible but quite unnatural.
The development of the system has arisen many
characteristic that require deeper understanding. We are
able to identify the problems and proposed the methods
to improve the synthesizer. It has also opened our mind
to another step further; which is to develop synthesizer
using unit selection database with small wave
modification implement in it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Authors thank all people at Computer-Aided Translation
Unit (UTMK) especially to the other Speech Team member at
UTMK; Dr Bali Ranaivo, Tan Tien Ping and Dr Chuah Choy
Kim. We would also say our gratitude to UTMK’s staff for
the information on the Malay sound system rules and also to
Morshidah Yazid as another developer of the system.
REFERENCES
[1] S. Lemmetty, “A Review of Speech Synthesis
Technology”, Master Thesis,Department of Electrical
and Communication Engineering, Helsinki University
of Technology, Helsinki, Finland, March 1999.
[2] X. Huang, A.Acero and H.-W. Hon, “Spoken Language
Processing A Guide to Theory, Algorithm and System
Development”, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001.
[3] A.W. Black and N. Campbell, “Optimising Selection of
Units from Speech Databases for Concatenative
Synthesis”, Proceeding Eurospeech ’95, Madrid, Spain,
September 1995, pp. 581 – 584.
[4] A.M. Zeki and N. Azizah, "A Speech Synthesizer for
Malay Language”, National Conference on Research
and Development in Computer Science, Selangor,
Malaysia, October 2001
[5] Y. A. El-Imam and Z.M. Don, "Text-to-Speech
Conversion of Standard Malay”, International Journal Of
Speech Technology, no 3, pp. 129 – 146, 2000.
[6] N.-H. Samsudin, “A Malay Speech Synthesizer”, Final
Year Undergraduate Project Report, School of Computer
Science, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia,
March 2003.