This paper will discuss how to determine word stress from spelling. Stress assignment is a well-established weak point for many speech synthesizers because stress dependencies cannot be determined locally. It is impossible to determine the stress of a word by looking through a five or six character window, as many speech synthesizers do. Wellknown examples such as degrade / dbgradl,tion and tMegraph / telegraph5 demonstrate that stress dependencies can span over two and three syllables. This paper will pre~nt a principled framework for dealing with these long distance dependencies. Stress assignment will be formulated in terms of Waltz' style.
