Placing pauses in read spoken Spanish: a model and an algorithm. Marín, R., Aguilar, L., & Casacuberta, D. Language Design. Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics, 4:49–66, 2002.
Placing pauses in read spoken Spanish: a model and an algorithm [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
The purpose of this work is to describe the appearance and location of typographically unmarked pauses in any Spanish text to be read. An experiment is designed to derive pause location from natural speech: results show that Intonation Group length constraints guide the appearance of pauses, which are placed depending on syntactic information. Then, a rule-based algorithm is developed to automatically place pauses whose performance is tested by means of qualitative tests. The evaluation shows that the system adequately places pauses in read texts, since it predicts 81% of orthographically unmarked pauses; when pauses associated to punctuation signs are included, the percentage of correct prediction increases to 92%

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