Impact of durational outlier removal from unit selection catalogs.
John Kominek, Alan W. Black · 2004
Outlier removal is a straightforward technique for improving the quality of unit selection catalogs without hand correction. This paper investigates the use of phone durations as a criteria for removing bad units. Scoring conditioned on linguistic context demonstrably better than statistics based on phone class alone. The impact of voice modification is evaluated with a 444K utterance test corpus. 1.