Is Unit Selection Aware of Audible Artifacts
Jindřich Matoušek, Daniel Tihelka, Milan Legát · Digital Library (University of West Bohemia) · 2013
This paper presents a new analytic method that can be used for analyzing perceptual relevance of unit selection costs and/or their sub-components as well as for tuning of unit selection weights. The proposed method is leveraged to investigate the behavior of a unit selection based system. The outcome is applied in a simple experiment with the aim to improve speech output quality of the system by setting limits on the costs and their sub-components during the search for optimal sequences of units. The experiments reveal that a large number (36.17%) of artifacts annotated by listeners are not reflected by the values of the costs and their sub-componets as currently implemented and tuned in the evaluated system.