Picture books mark-up language for story narration

• Main Author: Lu, Louis Patrice Robillo
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2013
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/4387
• Institution: De La Salle University

Picture Books is a story-generation system that produces fables based on user selected inputs. A speech synthesizer was later added to the system for the generated stories because some very young children could not read the stories. Having a synthesizer could increase the usability and effectiveness of the system to teach children ages 4-6 how to read. The problem is that, if succeeding Picture Books systems would add a speech synthesizer, it should require additional research to produce proper narration. The process of making a proper speech synthesis module would require technical knowledge, data gathering for audio features, and programming. The tasks would be enough to be a separate project and would be difficult to be done simultaneously with a story-generator. To address this issue, a story format in the form of a mark-up language is developed in this research to allow the speech synthesis part to be a separate module from the story generation part of Picture Books. The mark-up language uses information available from the story-generation module. The produced story format would then be fed into the speech synthesis module which will convert the file into audio narration. The produced mark-up language is a SGML based mark-up that can be used by different platforms from desktop to mobile as long as it generates and interprets the mark-up accordingly. Various tests were conducted to validate the mark-up. Three systems were developed namely: PBML Generator, PBML Interpreter for Desktop, and PBML Interpreter for Mobile devices. Test results show that the output of the PBML Generator were successfully interpreted by the Desktop and Mobile Interpreters.