Abstract
In a previous work we developed an HMM-based TTS system for a Basque dialect spoken in southern France. We observed that French words, frequent in daily conversations, were not pronounced properly by the TTS system because the training corpus contained very few instances of some French phones. This paper reports our attempt to improve the pronunciation of these phones without redesigning the corpus or recording the speaker again. Inspired by techniques used to adapt synthetic voices using dysarthric speech, we transplant phones of a different French voice to our Basque voice, and we show the slight improvements found after surgery.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (RESTORE project, TEC2015-67163-C2-1-R MINECO/FEDER, UE) and the Basque Government (ELKAROLA project, KK-2015/00098). The research stay of A. Pierard at UPV/EHU was funded by the Erasmus program. The French database used in this study was generously provided by Acapela Group. We thank B. Picart for his help.
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Pierard, A., Erro, D., Hernaez, I., Navas, E., Dutoit, T. (2016). Surgery of Speech Synthesis Models to Overcome the Scarcity of Training Data. In: Abad, A., et al. Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages. IberSPEECH 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10077. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49169-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49169-1_8
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