ISCA Archive Eurospeech 2001
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 2001

On the pronunciation of acronyms in French and in Italian

Philippe Boula de Mareüil, Franck Floricic

Acronyms are used more and more nowadays: this article describes their pronunciation in French and in Italian. Rules are proposed, so that a text-to-speech converter may know whether it must spell or read acronyms, and which way. Our analysis, which gave rise to a computational realisation, leans on the number of letters which constitute acronyms, on the vowel/consonant opposition, as well as on the distribution between continuous and momentary consonants.