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The problem of stress assignment is to identify which syllables are phonetically more prominent than the others in a word. It is not only of theoretical interests to linguists but also very important to Text-to-Speech systems in terms of both accuracy and naturalness of pronunciation. Besides providing an in-depth survey of existing stress assignment algorithms in the fields of linguistics and speech generation, this thesis presents a ranking approach to stress assignment for both letters and phonemes. The final system is language independent and clearly outperforms all previous systems. When combined with a current state of art Letter-to-Phoneme system, error rate in stress assignment is reduced by up to 40%