ISCA Archive SSW 2007
ISCA Archive SSW 2007

Adaptive database reduction for domain specific speech synthesis

Aleksandra Krul, Géraldine Damnati, François Yvon, Cédric Boidin, Thierry Moudenc

This paper raises the issue of speech database reduction adapted to a specific domain for Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis application. We evaluate several methods: a database pruning technique based on the statistical behaviour of the unit selection algorithm and a novel method based on the Kullback- Leibler divergence. The aim of the former method is to eliminate the least selected units during the synthesis of a domain specific training corpus. The aim of the latter approach is to build a reduced database whose unit distribution approximates a given target distribution. We compare the reduced databases. Finally we evaluate these methods on several objective measures given by the unit selection algorithm.