Nuance Vocalizer Developer's Guide - Avaya Support

Note: The last character in a sentence does not necessarily have to be a sentenceterminator. In some cases, sentences are enclosed inside quoted orparenthesized sections, for example:“Then he said: ‘Sorry, I can’t do that’.”PeriodsPeriods can be used as sentence terminators, abbreviation markers, decimalpoints, IP address dividers, and date dividers. Vocalizer determines the correctinterpretation from the context:■Sentence terminators—See Table 5 on page 70■Abbreviation markers—The period is considered an abbreviation marker if ithas not been identified as a sentence terminator and it follows either a singlecharacter or a known abbreviation. See “Abbreviations” on page 73.Note: As a general rule, allow two spaces to follow a sentence terminator, anduse a period and an optional space to terminate an abbreviation.■IP address dividers—See “Periods in digit sequences” on page 78■Decimals—See “Decimal fractions” on page 79■Date dividers—See “Dates” on page 84Hyphens and dashesSince hyphens, dashes, and minus signs are represented by the same ASCIIcharacter, ambiguous situations may occur at times. To avoid ambiguoussituations, Vocalizer uses a set of disambiguation rules. Specifically, Vocalizerconsiders the “-” character to be:■A minus sign if it is immediately followed by a digit.When a minus sign is identified, it is replaced by the word “minus.”■A dash if it has a whitespace on either side or if it is the first character in asentence.The dash is removed, and the output is marked to indicate the punctuation.■A soft hyphen if it follows a letter and is followed by a carriage return and aletter.The words on either side of the hyphen are joined and handled as a singleword.Chapter 9 Techniques for enhancing audio outputPhrasing and punctuation71