An Automatic Close Copy Speech Synthesis Tool for Large-Scale Speech Corpus Evaluation
Dafydd Gibbon, Jolanta Bachan · 2008
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 of the annotations by an expert listener for the detection of perceptually conspicuous systematic or isolated errors in the annotations.The criterion for perceptual conspicuousness was provided by converting the annotation formats into the interface format required by the MBROLA speech synthesiser.The audio screening procedure is complementary to other methods of corpus evaluation and does not replace them.Conceptually the ACCS synthesis tool is intended as an extension of the BLARK toolkit for speech corpora.