Minimum Text Corpus Selection for Limited Domain Speech Synthesis

摘要

This paper concerns limited domain ITS system based on the con-catenative method, and presents an algorithm capable to extract the minimal domain-oriented text corpus from the real data of the given domain, while still reaching the maximum coverage of the domain. The proposed approach ensures that the least amount of texts are extracted, containing the most common phrases and (possibly) all the words from the domain. At the same time, it ensures that appropriate phrase overlapping is kept, allowing to find smooth concatenation in the overlapped regions to reach high quality synthesized speech. In addition, several recommendations allowing a speaker to record the corpus more fluently and comfortably are presented and discussed. The corpus building is tested and evaluated on several domains differing in size and nature, and the authors present the results of the algorithm and demonstrate the advantages of using the domain oriented corpus for speech synthesis.