ISCA Archive Interspeech 2005
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2005

Measuring unsupervised acoustic clustering through phoneme pair merge-and-split tests

John Kominek, Alan W. Black

Subphonetic discovery through segmental clustering is a central step in building a corpus-based synthesizer. To help decide what clustering algorithm to use we employed merge-and-split tests on English fricatives. Compared to reference of 2%, Gaussian EM achieved a misclassification rate of 6%, K-means 10%, while predictive CART trees performed poorly.