Text to Speech Synthesis for Ethiopian Semitic
Languages: Issues and the Way Forward
Lemlem Hagos
IT PhD Program
Addis Ababa University
AAU
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
lemlem.hagos@aau.edu.et
Abstractcurrently there is a tremendous increase in
electronic text in various languages, including Ethiopian Semitic
languages. Yet, it is inaccessible to visually impaired people and
the illiterate. To come up with high quality text to speech
synthesizers for local languages, it is imperative that research in
natural language processing and synthetic speech generation be
improved. Accordingly, we critically reviewed core issues in text
to speech synthesis for Ethiopian Semitic languages and revealed
that further research to improve the quality of text to speech
synthesis for Ethiopian Semitic languages is mandatory. To
optimize linguistic resources required for high quality synthetic
speech output we propose designing a generic bilingual Text to
Speech framework for Ethiopian Semitic languages.
Keywordsspeech synthesis; Amharic Tigrigna; Bilingual
TTS; Ethiopian Semitic languages
I. INTRODUCTION
Text-To-Speech (TTS) is the process of converting text to
audible speech [1]. Towards this end, there has been research
endeavor to achieve the ultimate goal of speech synthesis that
mimic the speech production system of the human being [2].
The state-of-the-art shows that, nowadays researchers are
aiming at a more natural sounding and intelligible speech
output to be achieved [1].
TTS problem is an integration of two sub-problems, which
involve text analysis phase and speech generation phase [1].
Text analysis is the process of determining the underlying
structure of the sentence and the phonemic composition of each
word. Text analysis phase involves text preprocessing (text
normalization), word pronunciation (syllabification), phrasing
intonation (identifying phrase pattern), segmental duration and
computation of intonation contour from phonological
representations of the text [3]. When real world text is
considered, it contains non-standard words (NSWs) such as
numbers, acronyms and abbreviations in addition to standard
words, thus normalization process that expands each NSW into
respective pronounceable form is required [4].
Speech generation transforms the abstract linguistic
representation of text into speech waveform. Speech generation
phase is responsible for phonetic realization of each phoneme,
that is conversion of the phonemic representation in the text
into its spoken counterpart or speech sound [1]. The speech
978-1-4799-7498-6/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE
Million Meshesha
School of Information Science
Addis Ababa University
AAU
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Million.meshesha@aau.edu.et
synthesis part is also concerned with selection and
concatenation of appropriate speech units [3].
There are a wide range of problems in TTS [4]. One of the
challenges is pre-processing of non-standard words such as
numerals, abbreviations and acronyms [2]. While standard
words have specific pronunciation that can be described
phonetically by letter to phone (L2P) rule, pronunciation of
non-standard words is not straight forward as the written form
is far different from the spoken form [4][1]. There are also
problems related to correct prosody (rhythm and melody) and
pronunciation analysis of written text [2]. Generation of full
range of prosodic effects from text is challenging as text
encodes verbal message that the author generated whereas
prosody reflects the intention of the author. Thus, extraction of
prosodic information embedded in the context requires learning
about the prosodic features in context [1].
II. ETHIOPIAN SEMITIC LANGUAGE
Ethiopian Semitic language is a sub family of south-Semitic
which in turn is a sub family of West Semitic language under
the Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic super family.
Ethiopian Semitic language includes Geez, Tigrigna, Tigre,
Amharic, Argoba, and others [5]. The language family
basically uses the same writing system with slight modification
mainly needed to fit to the specific language characteristics. In
this section, we compare and contrast Amharic and Tigrigna,
the most widely spoken Semitic languages in Ethiopia with
specific emphasis on phonetic composition and syllable
structure.
A. Phone-sets of Amharic and Tigrigna
Amongst Ethiopian Semitic languages, Amharic and
Tigrigna share common characteristics derived from the same
Geez root [5].
According to Girmay, Tigrigna has 29 consonantal
phonemes and seven vowels [6]. This is so without considering
the labiovelars [gw], [kw], [kw] and the fricatives [X] and
[X]. Girmay argues that the labiovelars are derivable and the
fricatives are allophones of [k] and [k], respectively [6].
According to other researchers, however, these labiovelar and
the fricatives as well as the phoneme [V] are included in the
constant chart of Tigrigna as a result of which the number of
consonants would be 37 for Tigrigna [7][8].
 Amharic is also investigated to have controversial number
of consonants. According to Baye, Amharic has 30 consonants
[9]. Another argument is that Amharic has 21 underlying
consonants and 6 palatal consonants. Thus, these palatal
consonants are not required to be shown in the consonant chart
as they are derivable from the underlying consonants [10]. As
in Tigrigna, Amharic has seven vowels. Analysis on Amharic
and Tigrigna phonology also shows that Amharic and Tigrigna
share about 30 consonants in addition to the vowels, as
indicated in Table I.
Even though there are controversies over the inclusion of
the phoneme [V] and over the palatals, it is imperative that
text to speech synthesis requires consideration of inclusion of
all possible phonemes in the language. As shown in Table I,
the pharyngeal and fricative velars are the differentiating
phonemes that exist in Tigrigna but not in Amharic.
Accordingly, shared phonemes in these languages can be a
basis for developing a generic bilingual text to speech
synthesizer.
B. Standard and Non-Standard Words
Standard words refers to alphabetic strings that have a
regular entry in a lexicon while Non-Standard Words (NSWs)
comprise numerical patterns and alphabetic strings that do not
have a regular entry in a lexicon and their pronunciation needs
to be generated by a more complicated natural language
processing methods [4]. Written documents of Ethiopian
Semitic languages such as Amharic and Tigrigna contain
unrestricted texts which include both standard and non-
standard words. Pronunciation of non-standard words is more
challenging compared to that of standard words.
TABLE I. CONSONANT CHART FOR AMHARIC AND TIGRIGNA
Bilabial Labio- Alveolar
dental
Voiced b d
Fricative Plosives
Voiceless p t
Ejective p t
Voiced v z
voiceless f s
Ejective s x
Voiced
Voiceless
Affri
cate
Ejective
Nasal m n
Approximant w j
Liquids l
r
Ethiopia being multilingual and multinational country, its
constitution decrees that each nation, nationality and people has
the right to speak, write and develop its language [13].
Accordingly, there are a lot of written documents and text
books being produced in respective working languages of the
regional states. In addition to text books, a lot of journals,
magazines, newspapers and novels are available in Amharic
and Tigrigna. Furthermore, Ethiopian Semitic languages are
under resourced that to optimize utilization of linguistic
resource there is a need for a generic bilingual text to speech
synthesis framework for these languages. Thus, the purpose of
For instance, in Amharic the number 1980 can be read in a
number of ways such as Iasra ztn semanja or shizetn
meto semanja when used as a year or Iand shizeten meto
semanja when serving as a decimal number specifying a
quantity [11].
Similarly in Tigrigna text, there are various ways of
reading numbers and acronyms. A number such as 12605 can
be read as in more than one way when enumerated, when
serving as a car plate number and when serving as a numeric
quantity. Acronyms such as tImt can assume variants of
readings depending on what it represents, initials of proper
names for instance.
Thus, there is a need to implement a machine learning
technique so that the possible variants of NSWs in Amharic as
well as Tigrigna can be captured.
III. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The motivation behind this research is related to the
availability of many local languages and the need to ease the
sharing of information between those who hear only and read.
This is related to literacy level and disability especially visual
impairment. The 2011 Central Statistics Agency report
indicates that 46.8% of the entire population is found to be
literate. This shows that the level of illiteracy exceeds 50% at
national level [12].
Speech is the most effective means of communication
among humans [1]. Towards effective human-machine
communication TTS research has been pursued for the various
languages in the world, such as English, European languages
and Asian languages [2].
Palatal Velar plain Velar Laryngeal Pharyngeal
Labialized
g gw I
k kw I
k kw
z
sh x xw h
xw
dz
c
c
n
this study is to design a novel bilingual text to speech synthesis
framework for Ethiopian Semitic languages.
IV. REVIEW OF RELATED WORK
There are few research works based on Concatenative,
Formant as well as Parametric statistical methods for Ethiopian
languages. Laine [14] did the first Text to Speech System for
Amharic language using diphone based concatenative
synthesis. Tools used were Pascal and MATLAB, and the
evaluation reported as good. Furthermore, Laine noted that
prosodic information was not considered in his work.
 Henock [15] did the next attempt that applied concatenative
speech synthesis on Amharic. Tools and techniques include
TD-PSOLA technique for smoothing, PRAAT for
spectrographic analysis; and Delphi and MATLAB for
prototype development. Evaluation used included ORT (Open
Rhyme Test), and MOS (Mean Opinion Score), and result was
reported promising.
Tesfay [16] attempted the first text to speech for Tigrigna
language using diphone based concatenative approach with
MATLAB. The performance of the synthesizer measured using
MOS was 3.05. Inclusions of acronym converter to the text
processing module and prosody control are some of the things
that need researched further [16].
Nadew [17] implemented formant based speech synthesis
for Amharic vowels using MATLAB. The focus was on
vowels since vowels play a big role in change of pronunciation
of a word in different contexts. Result indicated intelligibility
of 88.85% for isolated vowels. Nadew recommended
refinement of the work including consonant consideration, and
preparation of appropriate speech corpus [17].
Bereket [18] modeled an HMM based speech synthesizer
with the objective of developing unlimited domain speech
synthesizer for Amharic language that can generate a natural
sounding and intelligible synthetic speech with less resource
requirement. Out of 11,670 sentences of corpus 500 sentences
were used to train the HTS, and 20 sentences were used for
testing. The performance reported was MOS of 4.12 and 3.6
for intelligibility and naturalness respectively. As a future
work, Bereket recommended inclusion of prosodic information
to identify dialects and word meanings [18].
Experiment by Alula [19] shows the possibility of including
non-standard words (NSWs) in Amharic TTS. Alula applied
Festival diphone based unit concatenative synthesis and RELP
Coding (Residual Excited Linear Predictive Coding).
Performance of the synthesizer was MOS of 3.0 and 2.83 for
intelligibility and naturalness respectively. Alula recommended
consideration of all types of NSWs and incorporation of part of
speech (POS) tagged corpus for prosody control as a future
work [19].
The few attempts that mostly test the possibility of
developing TTS synthesizers for Ethiopian languages are done
in a fragmented manner. Hence, there is a need for a generic
TTS synthesizer that would optimize linguistic resources.
Accordingly, the level of TTS quality for Ethiopian Semitic
languages needs further improvement. To this end the core
issues that need be addressed include homograph
disambiguation, extracting prosodic information from text and
incorporation of non-standard words in the development of a
generic bilingual TTS
V. EXPERIMENTATION WITH DEFAULT PARAMETER
This involves text corpus preparation, implementation, and
performance evaluation.
A. Corpus Preparation
This includes acquisition, preprocessing and annotation of
text data. Text data are acquired from Woyin newspaper and
reporter newspaper, for Tigrigna and Amharic respectively.
These sources are among the widely used public media that
publish issues related to economics, politics, sport, social and
technology issues among others.
Text data collected is further preprocessed so that the text is
composed of standard words from which punctuation marks are
removed. For data cleaning and sentence level tokenization,
Python programming language is used.
B. Implementation
Towards our effort to explore the extent to which an
already existing speech synthesis system such as festival can be
used for Ethiopian Semitic languages such as Amharic and
Tigrigna, a Linux environment was set up. With selected words
and phrases we tested the performance of the synthesizer with
default parameters. As shown in Table II, ten words and
phrases were selected that are composed of different syllables,
the smallest being one syllable word, the largest used is ten
syllables phrase.
To make the text input understandable to festival,
transliteration of Ethiopic orthography was necessary.
Accordingly, we developed a transliteration algorithm and
implemented it with python2.78. Transliterated version of the
text was then used as an input to the synthesizer. Speech output
corresponding to the text input was then saved as a .wav file for
later evaluation by listeners. The preliminary experimentation
shows that there is a promising result enabling the researchers
to identify the points where the existing speech synthesis
system fails to catch parts of Ethiopian Semitic languages.
C. Experimental Result and Discusion
The performance of the prototype developed during
experimentation is evaluated by means of intelligibility
measure, which tells the extent to which the synthetic speech is
comprehendible. Since the speech output produced is based on
default parameters which make use of foreign pronunciation,
naturalness test was not conducted.
As shown in Table II, intelligibility of the speech output
was evaluated by two bilingual speakers of the two languages
where they were asked to write what they perceived while
listening to the speech output. Then average number of
syllables correctly perceived was computed against the number
of syllables in the text to get the percentage of accuracy. Their
average response, 86.03% accuracy indicates that the point of
difficulties of the already existing system to pronounce t, k,
s, H among the unique phonemes in Amharic and Tigrigna is
visible. Moreover, the presence of allophones in Amharic and
Tigrigna are not recognized by the already existing synthesis
system, thus, there is a need to create voices for the languages
to improve the quality of the synthesized speech in terms of
both intelligibility and naturalness.
VI. CONCLUDING REMARK
This paper discusses TTS issues related to Ethiopian
Semitic language with specific emphasis to Amharic and
Tigrigna. There are a number of challenging issues that affect
the quality of synthetic speech for Ethiopian Semitic
languages. These issues include geminates, epenthetic vowel
insertion, homograph disambiguation, and normalization of
non-standard words. Even though TTS research attempts for
Ethiopian Semitic languages so far are encouraging, the issues
that affect the quality of synthetic speech need further attention
for improved TTS result. Ethiopian Semitic languages being
under resourced, the necessity of a generic TTS framework that
optimizes linguistic resources required to develop high quality
TTS system is imperative. Such framework will have a great
contribution towards improved TTS for local languages.
Accordingly we are working towards designing and
implementation of bilingual TTS for Ethiopian Semitic
language, with specific emphasis to Amharic and Tigrigna.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Our special thanks go to all those who inspired us to pursue
research on text to speech (TTS) synthesis by paving the way
ahead; those who devoted their lives to TTS research and
shared the fruit of their effort to us.
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TABLE II. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT

Tigrigna word and phrases with Gloss number of correctly Average
respective phonetic representation syllables perceived intelligibilit
average y
HI-luf past 2 1 50%
mar honey 1 1 100%
tIm-hIrt Education 2 2 100%
wI-lad we-li-da gives birth 4 3.5 87.5%
TI-rat jas-fe-llI-gal Effort needed 6 4.5 75%
wu-fu-jat tem-ha-ro committed students 6 5.5 91.67%
hIz-bba-wi-na s-la-ma-wi public and peaceful 7 7 100%
me-na-II-saj te-te-ki-Iom the young took over 8 7 87.5%
ke-ffI-te-Na wI-Tet jI-me-ze-ge-bbal Best to be achieved 11 9.5 86.36%
kI-rIn mo-ge-sIn nI-sI-wu-Iat-na Respect and grace for patriots 10 8.5 85.0%
be-weq-tu je-te-fe-Se-mew dzeg-nI-net Patriotism at that time 11 9 81.81%
Total 68 58.5 86.03%