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Discovering the Italian literature: interactive access to audio indexed text resources

In this paper we present a web interface to study Italian through the access to read Italian literature. The system allows to browse the content, search for specific words and listen to the correct pronunciation produced by native speakers in a given context. This work aims at providing people who are interested in learning Italian with a new way of exploring the Italian culture and literature through a web interface with a search module. By submitting a query, users may browse and listen to the results through several modalities including: a) the voice of a native speaker: if an indexed audio track is available, the user can listen either to the query terms or to the whole context in which they appear (sentence, paragraph, verse); b) a synthetic voice: the user can listen to the results read by a text-to-speech system; c) an avatar: the user can listen to and look at a talking head reading the paragraph and visually reproducing real speech articulatory movements. In its up to date version, different speech technologies currently being developed at ISTC-CNR are implemented into a single framework. The system will be described in detail and hints for future work are discussed.