Phonetically Balanced Text Corpus Design Using a Similarity Measure for a Stereo Super-Wideband Speech Database

• Published in: IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems Vol. E94.D; no. 7; pp. 1459 - 1466
• Main Authors: OH, Yoo Rhee, KIM, Yong Guk, KIM, Mina, KIM, Hong Kook, LEE, Mi Suk, BAE, Hyun Joo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Japanese
• Published: Oxford The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers 2011; Oxford University Press
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Circuit properties; Codec; Coding; Coding, codes; Computer science; control theory; systems; Conversation; Design engineering; Electric, optical and optoelectronic circuits; Electronic circuits; Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; Information systems. Data bases; Information, signal and communications theory; Memory organisation. Data processing; phonetically balanced text; Signal and communications theory; Signal convertors; Signal processing; Similarity; similarity measure; Software; Speech; Speech processing; super-wideband speech database; Telecommunications and information theory; text corpus design; Texts; similarity measure; Similarity; Pronunciation; super-wideband speech database; Korean; Sound quality; text corpus design; Subjective evaluation; Codec; Speech coding; Wide band; Database; Recording; phonetically balanced text; Phoneme; Speech processing
• ISSN: 0916-8532; 1745-1361; 1745-1361
• DOI: 10.1587/transinf.E94.D.1459

In this paper, we propose a text corpus design method for a Korean stereo super-wideband speech database. Since a small-sized text corpus for speech coding is generally required for speech coding, the corpus should be designed to comply with the pronunciation behavior of natural conversation in order to ensure efficient speech quality tests. To this end, the proposed design method utilizes a similarity measure between the phoneme distribution occurring from natural conversation and that from the designed text corpus. In order to achieve this goal, we first collect and refine text data from textbooks and websites. Next, a corpus is designed from the refined text data based on the similarity measure to compare phoneme distributions. We then construct a Korean stereo super-wideband speech (K-SW) database using the designed text corpus, where the recording environment is set to meet the conditions defined by ITU-T. Finally, the subjective quality of the K-SW database is evaluated using an ITU-T super-wideband codec in order to demonstrate that the K-SW database is useful for developing and evaluating super-wideband codecs.