CONCLUSION

In summary, we feel that the following features of the current Festival architecture go a substantial way to reaching the design goals mentioned in the introduction.

• Complex relations: allows trees, lists and other linguistic structures to be represented in the same formalism. Intersecting relations allow an item to be in more than one relation which reduces redundancy.

• Feature structures in items: allows arbitrary amounts and types of information to be used to describe linguistic objects. Due to run-time configurability, no re-compilation is needed for new types of information to be stored.

• Function features: allows useful information to be calculated on the fly, reducing redundancy.

• Speed: efficient implementation ensures that the expressive power of the architecture does not impose a prohibitive speed cost.

• Natural interface: quick to learn and hence programmers are not intimidated when learning to write modules for Festival.

That said, we acknowledge that architecture design is never a solved problem. As the standard of the architecture increases, so do the demands and expectations of the programmers using it, and hence new design features are always required. However, we feel that the features listed above are a substantial improvement on previous architectures and go along way to facilitating quick and easy speech synthesis programming and algorithm implementation.