Abstract
Pronunciation adaptation consists in predicting pronunciation variants of words and utterances based on their standard pronunciation and a target style. This is a key issue in text-to-speech as those variants bring expressiveness to synthetic speech, especially when considering a spontaneous style. This paper presents a new pronunciation adaptation method which adapts standard pronunciations to the style of individual speakers in a context of spontaneous speech. Its originality and strength are to solely rely on linguistic features and to consider a probabilistic machine learning framework, namely conditional random fields, to produce the adapted pronunciations. Features are first selected in a series of experiments, then combined to produce the final adaptation method. Backend experiments on the Buckeye conversational English speech corpus show that adapted pronunciations significantly better reflect spontaneous speech than standard ones, and that even better could be achieved if considering alternative predictions.
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Notes
- 1.
Asymmetric windows were also tested but they led to worse results.
- 2.
The p-values are 0.01037 and 0.008844 using a paired t-test and a paired Wilcoxon test, respectively, with a confidence level \(\alpha =0.05\).
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Qader, R., Lecorvé, G., Lolive, D., Sébillot, P. (2015). Probabilistic Speaker Pronunciation Adaptation for Spontaneous Speech Synthesis Using Linguistic Features. In: Dediu, AH., Martín-Vide, C., Vicsi, K. (eds) Statistical Language and Speech Processing. SLSP 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9449. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25789-1_22
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