Correct stress placement is important in text-to-speech systems, in terms of both the overall accuracy and the naturalness of pronunciation. In this paper, we formulate stress assignment as a sequence prediction problem. We represent words as sequences of substrings, and use the substrings as features in a Support Vector Machine (SVM) ranker, which is trained to rank possible stress patterns. The ranking approach facilitates inclusion of arbitrary features over both the input sequence and output stress pattern. .
