This paper presents a new Chinese text-to-speech system that produces very natural and intelligible synthetic Mandarin speech based on part-of-speech analysis, prosodic modeling and non-uniform units. The distinguishing features and key technology for the system can be summarized as follows: (1) A text analysis module for word identification and tagging was developed based on part-of-speech modeling and using heuristic rules to achieve very high accuracy. (2) The required prosodic parameters

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... the synthetic speech are derived fkom a two-stage procedure. The prosodic structures of the input texts are fmt derived firom a statistical model trained by a large speech database, and the prosodic parameters are then determined according to the structures. (3) A specially designed speech segments inventory constructed with non-uniform and pitch dependent units is used to improve the fluency and intelligibility of the system.