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

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. In particular the human component in the resource creation process is prone to inconsistencies, a situation which has frequently been documented in studies of cross-transcriber consistency in manual time-aligned signal annotation. 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...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Dafydd Gibbon, Jolanta Bachan
• Keywords: Education, LREC 2008, Multilingual Speech Corpus, Story-telling Learner Corpora, TTS Unit-selection Corpus