Test of Text-to-Speech (TTS) Abbreviations in Waze Clients

[harling]

Basically there needs to be positional awareness for handling things like St, Dr, N/S/E/W. Can anyone think of a name where St isn't Saint unless it's at the end of the name and therefore Street? Same thing for Dr.

'Storrow Dr E' is supposed to be "storrow drive east", not "storrow doctor east" or "storrow doctor ee". And each time someone comes up with an example that we haven't anticipated, the rules (and code) become messier and harder to maintain.

All these conditions and exceptions are easy enough for a human to follow, but to a computer, context-sensitive grammars are brittle. Trust me, I have done this for a living. Better to start now with as straightforward and literal a system as possible, or it will turn into a perpetual problem, where fixing one case will break several others.

[jenncard]

Per The Chicago Manual of Style, the correct abbreviation for Doctor is "Dr." and Saint is "St." (just as Ph.D. and NOT PhD is the correct abbreviation for that which I seek)

[mapcat]

Per The Chicago Manual of Style, the correct abbreviation for Doctor is "Dr." and Saint is "St." (just as Ph.D. and NOT PhD is the correct abbreviation for that which I seek)

I must have left my Chicago Manual of Style in my other office, so I can't check, but what does it recommend for Drive or Street?

[jenncard]

No love there.
While acknowledging that the US Postal Service prefers all caps and without the use of periods (e.g. "ST"), Chicago prefers the form of abbreviations with an initial capital and a period (e.g. "St.") when presented in tabular format and the like. In running text, Chicago advises that one spell out rather than abbreviate.

For those not listed, Chicago recommends that one consult a dictionary.

[jenncard]

Additional fly in the ointment, Chicago also diverges from USPS treatment of addresses containing compass points:

Single-letter compass points accompanying a street name are normally followed by a period; two-letter ones are not. (The US Postal Service does not use periods for either)

[bgodette]

I think we all realized going into this that it was not going to be trivial. I agree with Harling that whatever we come up with needs to be consistent and easy to implement in the parser.

Perhaps the way we should be approaching this is by what abbreviations are ambiguous; What else is there beyond the compass directions, St, Dr, and Bus? Are there other conflicts for Spanish and French? And then there's the ROTW once they get TTS.

[bmitch3020]

Any automated solution is going to result in a lot of one-off or edge cases that don't work correctly. I think the best solution is to provide a TTS input under the Label input. Use the default TTS rules if no values are provided, and show the expanded value. And if "customize TTS" or some other checkbox is selected, allow the map editor to put in plain English (or their language of choice) into the TTS box. E.g.:

Label: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. St N
TTS: Doctor Martin Luther King Junior Street North

Label: N St.
TTS: N Street

Label: Geo Wash Pkwy
TTS: George Washington Parkway

This way the label can match the sign, but the editor can fix the TTS if we see the default isn't correct.

[dmcconachie]

In my humble opinion, "N St" should be "North St". In this case it's the name not a prefix or suffix!

[CBenson]

How should the street between "M St" and "O St" be input so that it is not spoken "North St?"

[gettingthere]

May need to use a single or double quote around the street name so that Waze understands that it's not an abbreviation that needs to be expanded.

"N" St
or
'N' St

We just need to decide on a standard to use and ensure the TTS acts as we expect.

For example: in centro/downtown Tijuana Mexico, some streets are named with a letter. On the physical street signs, the letter is in double quotes.