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SSML 1.1: The Internationalization of SSMLDaniel C. BurnettAugust 9, 2006
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SSML 1.0
• Widely used
• Convenient for many languages
• However, . . .
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Chinese tones
• Mandarin is syllable-based, with tone movement a distinguishing feature of the syllable
妈 (mā) 麻 (má) 马 (mă) 骂 (mà)
• IPA is cumbersome when only the tone needs to be corrected– Eg., correcting Tone Sandhi
你好 ni3 hao3 ni2 hao3
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Chinese word boundaries
• Word boundaries are not given in typical writing
• 這一晚會如常舉行– 這一 晚會 如常 舉行 means “This banquet is
held as usual”– 這一晚 會 如常 舉行 means “Tonight will be
held as usual”
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Chinese names
• Chinese characters are pronounced differently (in a consistent manner) in names, particularly family names
• Cantonese example: 單明明單 /daan1/ /sin6/ (surname)
明明 /ming4 ming4/ /ming4 ming2/ (given name)
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Japanese Ruby
• Ruby is a typesetter’s annotation used in everyday print media. It– disambiguates Kanji text (Chinese
characters)– does this by giving the pronunciation
• Every Japanese person knows how to read it
• Why not use it for pronunciation?
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Mixed languages
• “Tonight’s movie is ‘La vita è bella’.”• Japanese and Chinese use the same
characters, but often with very different meanings
• How should mixed-language text be annotated?
• How do you change the language without changing the voice?– What does this question really mean?
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“Oh, and one more thing . . .”
• Korean/Hungarian need for PoS• Sub-word level prosody annotation (eg.,
contrastive stress at syllable level in Hungarian)
• Text with missing diacritics (eg., Polish SMS text)
• Other simplified/non-traditional text• Better support for highly-agglutinative
languages
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SSML 1.1
• Two workshops to solicit such examples
• SSML subgroup of W3C Voice Browser Working Group– Has met twice– Expects to release requirements later this
year
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SSML subgroup “charter”“. . . For Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi*, Arabic*,
Russian*, Korean, and Japanese, we will identify and address language phenomena that must be addressed to enable support for the language. Where possible we will address these phenomena in a way that is most broadly useful across many languages. We have chosen these languages because of their economic impact and expected group expertise and contribution. . . .”
* provided there is sufficient group expertise and contribution for these languages
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Some possible requirements
• Pronunciation scripts
• Word boundary
• Name identification
• Language indication
• Lexicon activation
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Pronunciation scripts• <phoneme alphabet=“whatever” …/>• Today, values other than IPA are
permitted but not standardized• New requirement might be:
– to establish registry (eg., at IANA) for standardizing values for
• Pinyin• Jyutping• Ruby• etc.
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Word boundary
• New requirement might be– to provide mechanism to eliminate word
segmentation ambiguities
• Note that white space is insufficient because– some languages (such as Vietnamese) use
white space for syllable segmentation– some languages (such as Urdu) use white
space for other purposes
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Name identification
• New requirement might be– to provide a mechanism to identify content
as a proper noun or a name
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Language indication• xml:lang is used in all XML languages to mean the
language of the content• Successor to RFC3266 clarifies region and dialect
encodinglanguage – script – region – variant – extension – private_use“zh-Hans-CN”
• New requirements might be– To clarify that xml:lang only indicates the language of the
content– To specify that selection of voice and language are
independent and that TTS vendors must document supported combinations of language and voice
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Lexicon activation
• Today, implicit lexicon activation in SSML based on– Language– Document order
• New requirement might be– Support explicit author control over which
lexicons are used for which portions of the SSML document
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Get involved
• W3C Voice Browser Working Group– Responsible for VoiceXML, SSML, SRGS,
and many other speech-related standards
• SSML subgroup– Seeking experts in Russian, Hebrew, and
Arabic
• Visit http://www.w3.org/Voice for more info
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