Augmented Prompt Selection for Evaluation of Spontaneous Speech Synthesis

Eva Szekely, Jens Edlund, Joakim Gustafson


Abstract
By definition, spontaneous speech is unscripted and created on the fly by the speaker. It is dramatically different from read speech, where the words are authored as text before they are spoken. Spontaneous speech is emergent and transient, whereas text read out loud is pre-planned. For this reason, it is unsuitable to evaluate the usability and appropriateness of spontaneous speech synthesis by having it read out written texts sampled from for example newspapers or books. Instead, we need to use transcriptions of speech as the target - something that is much less readily available. In this paper, we introduce Starmap, a tool allowing developers to select a varied, representative set of utterances from a spoken genre, to be used for evaluation of TTS for a given domain. The selection can be done from any speech recording, without the need for transcription. The tool uses interactive visualisation of prosodic features with t-SNE, along with a tree-based algorithm to guide the user through thousands of utterances and ensure coverage of a variety of prompts. A listening test has shown that with a selection of genre-specific utterances, it is possible to show significant differences across genres between two synthetic voices built from spontaneous speech.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.782
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6368–6374
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.782
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eva Szekely, Jens Edlund, and Joakim Gustafson. 2020. Augmented Prompt Selection for Evaluation of Spontaneous Speech Synthesis. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6368–6374, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Augmented Prompt Selection for Evaluation of Spontaneous Speech Synthesis (Szekely et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.782.pdf