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<Paper uid="W97-1202">
  <Title>Message-to-Speech: high quality speech generation for messaging and dialogue systems</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="14" end_page="14" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Current Developments
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We are currently enhancing the functionality of the MTS system in the following areas: l A more recent and detailed description can be found in (Reiter and Dale, 1997).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> * The MTS system in its current state only comprises carriers with one slot or multiple nonrelated slots. The slots of a carrier are filled in a fixed sequential way (left to right), so that the linguistic restrictions are also applied in the same order. This entails that no restrictions between related slots can be applied. Therefore, the selection mechanism risks entering a deadlock situation. E.g. consider the carrier &amp;quot;you have bought/number//item/' where /number/indicates the number of items/item/.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> /number/could be realised as &amp;quot;no, a(n), two, three&amp;quot; etc. In the case that &amp;quot;num= 1&amp;quot;, the system blocks since the argument &amp;quot;1&amp;quot; cannot be realised as long as the phonetic on-set of the following word is not known. But that word cannot be realised (singular vs. plural) either since the number slot is not yet filled in.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * The MTS system in its current state only deals with atomic arguments. For some applications, it is also useful to support lists as arguments. A back-end application then could use the same message unit to have the MTS system generate e.g. &amp;quot;You have new mail from Tom&amp;quot; (atomic argument) or &amp;quot;You have new mail from Tom, Paul and John&amp;quot; (list argument). In order to achieve this, the MTS system will have to deal with syntactic aggregation (Dalianis and Hovy, 1996; Dalianis, 1996a).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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