Evaluation of Flat Start Labeling for Phoneme based Mandarin HTS System

Yong Guan, Jilei Tian in OCOCOSDA2009. we proposed a phoneme based Mandarin HTS speech synthesis system trained with flat start scheme. Conventionally the full context labels with phonetic time segmentation are required for HTS training. The segmentation is generated by ASR force alignment using the pre-trained ASR models. Thus it brings the dependency on ASR while developing HTS system and causes different label in HTS between training and testing. Flat start labeling, which uses uniformed segmentation in label, was proposed and evaluated by comparing with segmentation using ASR mode as a reference. The subject listening test results showed that flat start scheme performs equally well as the reference system using ASR force alignment when realignment labeling using trained HTS model is iteratively applied. This result is very promising for efficiently developing and porting HTS system to a new language.

OCOCOSDA2009_Yong_Flatstart.pdf — PDF document, 99Kb