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10.3 Adding Sable tags

We do not yet claim that there is a fixed standard for Sable tags but we wish to move towards such a standard. In the mean time we have made it easy in Festival to add support for new tags without, in general, having to change any of the core functions.

Two changes are necessary to add a new tags. First, change the definition in lib/Sable.v0_2.dtd, so that Sable files may use it. The second stage is to make Festival sensitive to that new tag. The example in festival/lib/sable-mode.scm shows how a new text mode may be implemented for an XML/SGML-based markup language. The basic point is that an identified function will be called on finding a start tag or end tags in the document. It is the tag-function’s job to synthesize the given utterance if the tag signals an utterance boundary. The return value from the tag-function is the new status of the current utterance, which may remain unchanged or if the current utterance has been synthesized nil should be returned signalling a new utterance.

Note the hierarchical structure of the document is not available in this method of tag-functions. Any hierarchical state that must be preserved has to be done using explicit stacks in Scheme. This is an artifact due to the cross relationship to utterances and tags (utterances may end within start and end tags), and the desire to have all specification in Scheme rather than C++.

The tag-functions are defined in an elements list. They are identified with names such as "(SABLE" and ")SABLE" denoting start and end tags respectively. Two arguments are passed to these tag functions, an assoc list of attributes and values as specified in the document and the current utterances. If the tag denotes an utterance break, call xxml_synth on UTT and return nil. If a tag (start or end) is found in the document and there is no corresponding tag-function it is ignored.

New features may be added to words with a start and end tag by adding features to the global xxml_word_features. Any features in that variable will be added to each word.

Note that this method may be used for both XML based lamnguages and SGML based markup languages (though and external normalizing SGML parser is required in the SGML case). The type (XML vs SGML) is identified by the analysis_type parameter in the tts text mode specification.