In response to a word of a text sequence, a first part-of-speech (POS) tag is generated using a statistical part-of-speech (POS) tagger based on a corpus of trained text sequences, each representing a likely POS of a word for a given text sequence. A second POS tag is generated using a rule-based POS tagger based on a set of one or more rules associated with a type of an application associated with the text sequence. A final POS tag is assigned to the word of the text sequence for TTS synthesis based on the first POS tag and the second POS tag.