An Automatic Close Copy Speech Synthesis Tool for Large-Scale Speech Corpus Evaluation

Dafydd Gibbon, Jolanta Bachan


Abstract
The production of rich multilingual speech corpus resources on a large scale is a requirement for many linguistic, phonetic and technological tasks, in both research and application domains. It is also time-consuming and therefore expensive. The human component in the resource creation process is also prone to inconsistencies, a situation frequently documented in cross-transcriber consistency studies. In the present case, corpora of three languages were to be evaluated and corrected: (1) Polish, a large automatically annotated and manually corrected single-speaker TTS unit-selection corpus in the BOSS Label File (BLF) format, (2) German and (3) English, the second and third being manually annotated multi-speaker story-telling learner corpora in Praat TextGrid format. A method is provided for supporting the evaluation and correction of time-aligned annotations for the three corpora by permitting a rapid audio screening of the annotations by an expert listener for the detection of perceptually conspicuous systematic or isolated errors in the annotations. The criterion for perceptual conspicuousness was provided by converting the annotation formats into the interface format required by the MBROLA speech synthesiser. The audio screening procedure is complementary to other methods of corpus evaluation and does not replace them.
Anthology ID:
L08-1481
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/228_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dafydd Gibbon and Jolanta Bachan. 2008. An Automatic Close Copy Speech Synthesis Tool for Large-Scale Speech Corpus Evaluation. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
An Automatic Close Copy Speech Synthesis Tool for Large-Scale Speech Corpus Evaluation (Gibbon & Bachan, LREC 2008)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/228_paper.pdf