Abstract
A large number of methods for measuring of audible discontinuities, which occur at concatenation points in synthesized speech, have been proposed in recent years. However, none of them proved to be comparatively better than others across all languages and recording conditions and the presented results have sometimes even been in contradiction. What is more, none of the tested concatenation cost functions seem to be reliably reflecting the human perception of such discontinuities. Thus, the design of the concatenation cost functions is still an open issue, and there is a lot of work remaining to be done. In this paper, we deal with the problem of preparing the test stimuli for evaluating the performance of these functions, which is, in our opinion, one of the key aspects in this field.
This research was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic, project No. 2C06020 and the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, project No. GACR 102/09/0989.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Hunt, A., Black, A.: Unit selection in a concatenative speech synthesis system using a large speech database. In: ICASSP 1996, vol. 1, pp. 373–376 (1996)
Pantazis, Y., Stylianou, Y.: On the detection of discontinuities in concatenative speech synthesis. In: Stylianou, Y., Faundez-Zanuy, M., Esposito, A. (eds.) COST 277. LNCS, vol. 4391, pp. 89–100. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Vepa, J., King, S.: Join cost for unit selection speech synthesis. In: Alwan, A., Narayanan, S. (eds.) Speech Synthesis. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (2004)
Kawai, H., Tsuzaki, M.: Acoustic measures vs. phonetic features as predictors of audible discontinuity in concatenative speech synthesis. In: ICSLP 2002, pp. 2621–2624 (2002)
Chen, J., Campbell, N.: Objective distance measures for assessing concatenative speech synthesis. In: EUROSPEECH 1999, pp. 611–614 (1999)
Vepa, J.: Join cost for unit selection speech synthesis. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh (2004)
Bellegarda, J.R.: A novel discontinuity metric for unit selection text–to–speech synthesis. In: EUROSPEECH 1999, pp. 611–614 (1999)
Tsuzaki, M.: Feature extraction by auditory modelling for unit selection in concatenative speech synthesis. In: EUROSPEECH 2001, pp. 2223–2226 (2001)
Klabbers, E., Veldhuis, R.: Reducing audible spectral discontinuities. IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing 9, 39–51 (2001)
Kirkpatrick, B., O’Brien, D., Scaife, R.: Feature extraction for spectral continuity measures in concatenative speech synthesis. In: INTERSPEECH 2006 (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Legát, M., Matoušek, J. (2009). Design of the Test Stimuli for the Evaluation of Concatenation Cost Functions. In: Matoušek, V., Mautner, P. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5729. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04208-9_47
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04208-9_47
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04207-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04208-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)