Audio Rendering of MathML

Greetings everyone!

I'm working and studying at the Faculty of Engineering University of Porto, Portugal, and my final project consists in parsing scientifc texts for audio rendering.

Basically i'm developping a parser in perl to parse MathML to plain text, and then send it to a TTS engine.
What i would like to know is if there is already something done in this area, using or not, the same techology as I (perl in my case). Does anyone have any good suggestions?

One of the aims of my project is also to study F0 contours and other specific speech parameters to tag the rendered text with additional information that can be used by a TTS engine.
Is there anyone out there working with the semantics/pronounciation of mathematical expressions?

Will MathML in the future provide any markup tags or attributes for speech tagging? Aural CSS doesn't seem enough.

The Mathml 2.0 Spec is not very specific about audio rendering.

At the moment i'm also developping something (still in the beginning) that we have baptized as Text Processing Markup Language - TPML, which, i hope, will allow the mathml parser to add additional speech synthesis information that can be sent to a TTS engine.

I'm open to suggestions and new ideas.

Thanks everyone.


    Helder Ferreira


    Laboratory for Speech Synthesis, Electroacustics, Signals and Instrumentation
    Faculty of Engineering University of Porto