Constructing a segment database for greek time domain speech synthesis
Stavroula–Evita Fotinea, George Tambouratzis, George V. Carayannis · 2001
Abstract In this article, a methodology is presented regarding thedesign of a segment database for use with a time-domainspeech synthesis system for the Greek language. The mainissue of this process is the systematic generation of a corpuscontaining all possible instances of the segments for thespecific language. Particular issues such as the phoneticcoverage, the sentence selection as well as iterative evaluationtechniques employing custom-built tools are discussed. Theresulting corpus is characterised by a near-minimal size,provides a complete coverage of the Greek language and itsdistribution of phonemes is similar to that of natural corpora.A typical spoken acquisition procedure may then beperformed, resulting in a segment database for use with atime-domain Greek synthesizer. The corpus creationprocedure allows for the fine-tuning of the segment database’slanguage-dependent characteristics and thus assists in thegeneration of high-quality text-to-speech synthesis. 1. Introduction