Constructing text-to-speech systems for languages with unknown pronunciations

• Published in: Acoustical Science and Technology Vol. 39; no. 2; pp. 119 - 129
• Main Authors: Sawada, Kei, Hashimoto, Kei, Oura, Keiichiro, Nankaku, Yoshihiko, Tokuda, Keiichi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tokyo ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN 01.01.2018; Japan Science and Technology Agency
• Subjects: Converters; Language; Language-independent method; Languages; Low-resource language; Phonetics; Speech; Speech recognition; Statistical parametric speech synthesis; Systems analysis; Text-to-speech system; Unknown pronunciation language
• ISSN: 1346-3969; 1347-5177
• DOI: 10.1250/ast.39.119

This paper proposes a method for constructing text-to-speech (TTS) systems for languages with unknown pronunciations. One goal of speech synthesis research is to establish a framework that can be used to construct TTS systems for any written language. Generally, language-specific knowledge is required to construct TTS systems for a new language. However, it is difficult to acquire language-specific knowledge in each new language. Therefore, constructing a TTS system for a new language entails huge costs. To address this problem, we investigate a framework for automatically constructing a TTS system from a target language database consisting of only speech data and corresponding Unicode texts. In the proposed method, pseudo phonetic information of the target language with unknown pronunciation is obtained by a speech recognizer of a rich-resource proxy language. Then, a grapheme-to-phoneme converter and a statistical parametric speech synthesizer are constructed based on the obtained pseudo phonetic information. The proposed method was applied to Japanese and was evaluated in terms of objective and subjective measures. Additionally, we challenged the construction of TTS systems for nine Indian languages using the proposed method, and TTS systems were evaluated in the Blizzard Challenge 2014 and 2015.