Prosody Modelling of Spanish for Expressive Speech Synthesis

Iriondo, Ignasi; Socoró, Joan Claudi; Álías, Francesc

doi:10.1109/icassp.2007.367039

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…pitch, energy, duration) and linguistic specifications e.g. stress, position [6], [11], [16]. The concatenation cost quantifies the difference between consecutive units at concatenation point (e.g.…”

Section: A Unit Selection Text-to-speech Synthesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary process indicators for active IGAs applied to weight tuning in unit selection TTS synthesis

Formiga

Álías

Llorà

2010

IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation

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Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis systems produce speech from an input text. Corpus based or unit selection TTS (US-TTS) are based on retrieving the best set of speech units from a large labelled speech database. To that effect, the unit selection is guided by dynamic programming and a weighted cost function. Several weight tuning approaches have been defined so as to integrate human preferences inthe unit selection process, but with no great success beyond expert-based hand tuning. However, active interactive genetic algorithms (aiGAs) have showed promising results working on the unit selection text-to-speech (US-TTS) weight tuning problem in previous works. aiGAs are an evolution of classic interactive genetic algorithms (IGAs) in terms of reducing fatigue, ambiguity and frustration in user's evaluations. This paper presents a step further in the application of aiGAs to this problem by defining new indicators of the perceptually-based evolutionary process to obtain more reliable weights. The experiments have been conducted on one hour Spanish speech database and using an acoustic plus linguistic cost function.

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Section: A Unit Selection Text-to-speech Synthesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary process indicators for active IGAs applied to weight tuning in unit selection TTS synthesis

Formiga

Álías

Llorà

2010

IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation

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“…Thus, it is essential to cover the most usual diphonemes and some triphonemes and to consider the phonetic frequency distribution for a specific language. The prosodic coverage will be achieved by guaranteeing a specific variety of intonation patterns by selecting declarative, interrogative and exclamation expressions (Iriondo et al, 2007c).…”

Section: Theoretical Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic refinement of an expressive speech corpus assembling subjective perception and automatic classification

Iriondo

Planet

Socoró

et al. 2009

Speech Communication

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tomatic refinement of an expressive speech corpus assembling subjective perception and automatic classification. Speech Communication, Elsevier : North-Holland, 2009, 51 (9) This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT AbstractThis paper presents an automatic system able to enhance expressiveness in speech corpora recorded from acted or stimulated speech. The system is trained with the results of a subjective evaluation carried out on a reduced set of the original corpus. Once the system has been trained, it is able to check the complete corpus and perform an automatic pruning of the unclear utterances, i.e. with expressive styles which are different from the intended corpus. The content which most closely matches the subjective classification remains in the resulting corpus. An expressive speech corpus in Spanish, designed and recorded for speech synthesis purposes, has been used to test the presented proposal. The automatic refinement has been applied to the whole corpus and the result has been validated with a second subjective test.

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“…Como es habitual en un campo interdisciplinar, encontramos aproximaciones que incorporan conocimiento lingüístico tanto en español (Garrido 1996y Garrido, Ortín, Quazza, Salza & Mancini 2000 como en portugués (Freitas & Braga 2002), frente a las que adoptan un enfoque más computacional, sea en español (Escudero 2002, Escudero & Cardeñoso 2006, 2007 (Cabral & Oliveira 2006). Muchos de los trabajos suelen centrarse en las emociones conocidas como The Big Six -felicidad, tristeza, miedo, asco, enfado y sorpresa (Cornelius 2000) -pero, aun así, la definición de cada una de ellas no deja de ser problemática.…”

Section: La Conversión De Texto En Hablaunclassified

Las tecnologías del habla en las lenguas románicas ibéricas

Llisterri

2009

Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics

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This paper reviews the development of speech technologies for Iberian Romance languages (Catalan, Galician, Spanish and Portuguese) with a special emphasis on the phonetic knowledge involved in the three core areas in the field: text-to-speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition and spoken language systems. Several important technological advances have taken place during the last decades and there is a substantial base of active researchers in the areas of engineering and computer science. However, the trend towards the use of automatic learning techniques and corpus-based models has seriously reduced the role of linguistics, favoring a reduction in time in the development of applications over basic research into the nature of the speech code.

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Prosody Modelling of Spanish for Expressive Speech Synthesis

Cited by 8 publications

References 10 publications

Evolutionary process indicators for active IGAs applied to weight tuning in unit selection TTS synthesis

Evolutionary process indicators for active IGAs applied to weight tuning in unit selection TTS synthesis

Automatic refinement of an expressive speech corpus assembling subjective perception and automatic classification

Las tecnologías del habla en las lenguas románicas ibéricas

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