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<Paper uid="W97-0608">
  <Title>A practical Message-to-Speech strategy for dialogue systems</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="42" end_page="43" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Discussion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The MTS described above is realised in the context of a dialogue system that places a heavy burden on its hardware environment. It produces high quality speech while morpho-syntactic variations are taken  into account. More specifically, as the MUs and underlying carriers take arguments, it is possible to generate several variants of the same basic message. * variations on the level of a carrier slot can be paradigmatic: a message ranges over all the elements belonging to a certain semantic category (e.g. product name, cardinality) but the actual message is not known on beforehand.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> * variations on the level of a carrier slot can be merely syntagmatic: agreement of all kinds, liaison, contraction, etcetera.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * variations on the carrier level combine both: a message unit can be expressed by other carriers possibly implying other paradigmatic combinations and/or different syntagmatic variations (e.g X replaces Y --~ Y is substituted with X).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * variations on the level of the message units can be semantic: new combinations of message units lead to the creation of new messages.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Also, the MUs and the underlying carriers can be re-used to compose new messages without any loss in speech quality. Good prosody for the carriers is obtained thanks to the prosody transplantation technique. For the slot arguments the same technique can be applied, or prosody is calculated on basis of specific duration and intonation models.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In addition, as the language and task independent core engine is very strictly separated from the language dependent knowledge bases, it is very easy to tailor the MTS system to specific tasks.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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