Building Synthetic Voices in the META-NET Framework

Emília Garcia Casademont, Antonio Bonafonte, Asunción Moreno


Abstract
METANET4U is a European project aiming at supporting language technology for European languages and multilingualism. It is a project in the META-NET Network of Excellence, a cluster of projects aiming at fostering the mission of META, which is the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance, dedicated to building the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. This paper describe the resources produced at our lab to provide Synthethic voices. Using existing 10h corpus for a male and a female Spanish speakers, voices have been developed to be used in Festival, both with unit-selection and with statistical-based technologies. Furthermore, using data produced for supporting research on intra and inter-lingual voice conversion, four bilingual voices (English/Spanish) have been developed. The paper describes these resources which are available through META. Furthermore, an evaluation is presented to compare different synthesis techniques, influence of amount of data in statistical speech synthesis and the effect of sharing data in bilingual voices.
Anthology ID:
L12-1621
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3322–3326
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/1042_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emília Garcia Casademont, Antonio Bonafonte, and Asunción Moreno. 2012. Building Synthetic Voices in the META-NET Framework. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 3322–3326, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Building Synthetic Voices in the META-NET Framework (Casademont et al., LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/1042_Paper.pdf