A Dynamic Model for Pauses in the Synthesized Speech of Mathematical Expressions in MathML.

Voice synthesizers still present several challenges in the speech of mathematical content, as spoken mathematics has quite peculiar rules. In the synthesized speech, pauses help blind and visually impaired students identify the limits of mathematical operators and subexpressions. However, most studies on pauses define them uniformly or use simple punctuation marks to force the synthesizer to introduce pauses in certain parts of the expression. Speech is a dynamic process and pauses in expressions also need to be dynamic to make the synthetic speech of expressions more natural, as this can help in memorizing this type of content. This work proposed a dynamic model of pauses for mathematical expressions. Collected math expressions spoken by teachers were used to create the model. These expressions were useful for identifying patterns and creating a linear regression model. Blind and visually impaired students evaluated the model. Some improvements were observed when we compared the synthesized mathematical expressions with the model and Audiomath, the parameter tool used in this study.