Word intelligibility testing and TTS system improvement

Author

Yu, Zhenli ; Yue, Dongjian ; Zu, Yiqing ; Chen, Guilin

Author_Institution

Sch. of Eng. & Innovation, Shanghai Inst. of Technol., Shanghai, China

fYear

2010

fDate

24-28 Oct. 2010

Firstpage

593

Lastpage

596

Abstract

An approach of word intelligibility evaluation and diagnose of an embedded English TTS system for improvement is presented. The TTS engine is based on the concatenation of variable-length speech units. Multi-Syllable Word Test (MSWT) word corpus is designed for the evaluation. Letter to sound, syllable boundary, prosodic satisfactory, concatenation smoothness, compression distortion as well as the isolated word intelligibility as a whole is tested. Diagnostic analysis cycle is conducted to give the guideline of improving the system. Testing strategy, testing material design, testing tool design and testing procedure are described. Discussion is given. The approach can be applied to different languages and can be adopted for alternate TTS approaches such as HTS.

Keywords

natural language processing; speech intelligibility; speech synthesis; word processing; MSWT word corpus; TTS engine; TTS system; compression distortion; concatenation smoothness; diagnostic analysis cycle; embedded English TTS system; multisyllable word test; prosodic satisfactory; speech synthesis; syllable boundary; text-to-speech system; variable-length speech unit; word intelligibility testing; Engines; Graphical user interfaces; Materials; Speech; Speech synthesis; Testing; speech evaluation; speech synthesis; text-to-speech; word intelligibilty;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Signal Processing (ICSP), 2010 IEEE 10th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Beijing

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-5897-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICOSP.2010.5655862

Filename

5655862