Abstract
In this paper we investigate a bilingual HMM-based speech synthesis developed for Slovenian and Croatian languages. The primary goals of this research are to investigate the performance of an HMM-based synthesis build from two similar languages and to perform a comparison of such synthesis system with standard monolingual speaker-dependent HMM-based synthesis. The bilingual HMM synthesis is built by joining all the speech material from both languages by defining proper mapping of Slovenian and Croatian phonemes and by adapting acoustic models of Slovenian and Croatian speakers. Adapted acoustic models are then served as basic building blocks for speech synthesis in both languages. In such a way we are able to obtain synthesized speech of both languages, but with the same speaker voice. We made the quantitative comparison of such kind of synthesis with monolingual counterparts and study the performance of the synthesis in a relation to the amount of data, which is used for building the synthesis system.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Latorre, J., Iwano, K., Furui, S.: New approach to the polyglot speech generation by means of an HMM-based speaker adaptable synthesizer. Speech Commun. 48, 1227–1242 (2006)
Vesnicer, B., Mihelič, F.: Evaluation of the Slovenian HMM-Based Speech Synthesis System. In: Sojka, P., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds.) TSD 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3206, pp. 513–520. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Martinčić-Ipčić, S., Ipčić, I.: Croatian HMM-based speech synthesis. CIT 14, 307–313 (2006)
Yamagishi, J., Kobayashi, T.: Average-voice-based speech synthesis using hsmm-based speaker adaptation and adaptive training. IEICE Trans., 533–543 (2007)
Gales, M.: Maximum likelihood linear transformations for HMM-based speech recognition. Computer Speech and Language 12, 75–98 (1998)
Martinčić-Ipčić, S., Ipčić, I.: Veprad: a croatian speech database of weather forecasts. In: Proc. 25th Int. Conf. ITI, pp. 321–326 (2003)
Žibert, J., Mihelič, F.: Slovenian weather forecast speech database. In: Proc., SoftCOM, vol. 1, pp. 199–206 (2000)
Wells, J.C.: SAMPA computer readable phonetic alphabet. In: Handbook of Standards and Resources for Spoken Language Systems. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (1997)
Prahallad, K., Black, A.W., Mosur, R.: Sub-phonetic modeling for capturing pronunciation variation in conversational speech synthesis. In: Proc. of IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech, and Signal Processing (2006)
Zen, H., Oura, K., Nose, T., Yamagishi, J., Sako, S., Toda, T., Masuko, T., Black, A.W., Tokuda, K.: Recent development of the HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS). In: Proc. APSIPA 2009, Sapporo, Japan (2009)
International Telecommunication Union: ITU-T Recommendation P.800.1: Mean Opinion Score (MOS) terminology. Technical report (2006)
Hochberg, Y., Tamhane, A.C.: Multiple Comparison Procedures. Wiley, New York (1987)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Justin, T., Pobar, M., Ipšić, I., Mihelič, F., Žibert, J. (2012). A Bilingual HMM-Based Speech Synthesis System for Closely Related Languages. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7499. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32790-2_66
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32790-2_66
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32789-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32790-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)