Restricted unlimited domain synthesis
Antje Schweitzer · 2003
This paper describes the hybrid unit selection strategy for re-stricted domain synthesis in the SmartKom dialog system. Re-stricted domains are characterized as being biased toward do-main specific utterances while being unlimited in terms of vo-cabulary size. This entails that unit selection in restricted do-mains must deal with both domain specific and open-domain material. The strategy presented here combines the advan-tages of two existing unit selection approaches, motivated by the claim that the phonological structure matching approach is advantageous for domain specific parts of utterances, while the acoustic clustering algorithm is more appropriate for open-domain material. This dichotomy is also reflected in the speech database, which consists of a domain specific and an open-domain part. The text material for the open-domain part was constructed to optimize coverage of diphones and phonemes in different contexts. 1.