Objective evaluation of grapheme to phoneme conversion for text-to-speech synthesis in French

This paper reports on a cooperative international evaluation of grapheme-to-phoneme (GP) conversion for text-to-speech synthesis in French. Test methodology and test corpora are described. The results for eight systems are provided and analysed in some detail. The contribution of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, it gives an accurate picture of the state-of-the-art in the domain of GP conversion for French, and points out the problems still to be solved. On the other hand, much room is devoted to a discussion of methodological issues for this task. We hope this could help future evaluations of similar systems in other languages.