Developing Objective Measures of Foreign-Accent Conversion

Various methods have recently appeared to transform foreign-accented speech into its native-accented counterpart. Evaluation of these accent conversion methods requires extensive listening tests across a number of perceptual dimensions. This article presents three objective measures that may be used to assess the acoustic quality, degree of foreign accent, and speaker identity of accent-converted utterances. Accent conversion generates novel utterances: those of a foreign speaker with a native accent. Therefore, the acoustic quality in accent conversion cannot be evaluated with conventional measures of spectral distortion, which assume that a clean recording of the speech signal is available for comparison. Here we evaluate a single-ended measure of speech quality, ITU-T recommendation P.563 for narrow-band telephony. We also propose a measure of foreign accent that exploits a weakness of automatic speech recognizers: their sensitivity to foreign accents. Namely, we use phoneme-level m...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TASLP
• Authors: Daniel Felps, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
• Keywords: Accent Conversion, Foreign Accents, Native Accent, Software Engineering, TASLP 2010