Statistical text-to-speech synthesis of Spanish subtitles

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13623-3_5Online multimedia repositories are growing rapidly. However, language barriers are often difficult to overcome for many of the current and potential users. In this paper we describe a TTS Spanish sys- tem and we apply it to the synthesis of transcribed and translated video lectures. A statistical parametric speech synthesis system, in which the acoustic mapping is performed with either HMM-based or DNN-based acoustic models, has been developed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a DNN-based TTS system has been implemented for the synthesis of Spanish. A comparative objective evaluation between both models has been carried out. Our results show that DNN-based systems can reconstruct speech waveforms more accurately.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 287755 (transLectures) and ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP/2007-2013) as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) under grant agreement no 621030 (EMMA), and the Spanish MINECO Active2Trans (TIN2012-31723) research project.Piqueras Gozalbes, SR.; Del Agua Teba, MA.; Giménez Pastor, A.; Civera Saiz, J.; Juan Císcar, A. (2014). Statistical text-to-speech synthesis of Spanish subtitles. En Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages: Second International Conference, IberSPEECH 2014, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, November 19-21, 2014. Proceedings. Springer International Publishing. 40-48. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13623-3_5S4048Ahocoder, http://aholab.ehu.es/ahocoderCoursera, http://www.coursera.orgHMM-Based Speech Synthesis System (HTS), http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jpKhan Academy, http://www.khanacademy.orgAxelrod, A., He, X., Gao, J.: Domain adaptation via pseudo in-domain data selection. In: Proc. of EMNLP, pp. 355–362 (2011)Bottou, L.: Stochastic gradient learning in neural networks. In: Proceedings of Neuro-Nîmes 1991. EC2, Nimes, France (1991)Dahl, G.E., Yu, D., Deng, L., Acero, A.: Context-dependent pre-trained deep neural networks for large-vocabulary speech recognition. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 20(1), 30–42 (2012)Erro, D., Sainz, I., Navas, E., Hernaez, I.: Harmonics plus noise model based vocoder for statistical parametric speech synthesis. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing 8(2), 184–194 (2014)Fan, Y., Qian, Y., Xie, F., Soong, F.: TTS synthesis with bidirectional LSTM based recurrent neural networks. In: Proc. of Interspeech (submitted 2014)Hinton, G., Deng, L., Yu, D., Dahl, G.E., Mohamed, A.R., Jaitly, N., Senior, A., Vanhoucke, V., Nguyen, P., Sainath, T.N., et al.: Deep neural networks for acoustic modeling in speech recognition: The shared views of four research groups. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 29(6), 82–97 (2012)Hunt, A.J., Black, A.W.: Unit selection in a concatenative speech synthesis system using a large speech database. In: Proc. of ICASSP, vol. 1, pp. 373–376 (1996)King, S.: Measuring a decade of progress in text-to-speech. Loquens 1(1), e006 (2014)Koehn, P.: Statistical Machine Translation. Cambridge University Press (2010)Kominek, J., Schultz, T., Black, A.W.: Synthesizer voice quality of new languages calibrated with mean mel cepstral distortion. In: Proc. of SLTU, pp. 63–68 (2008)Lopez, A.: Statistical machine translation. ACM Computing Surveys 40(3), 8:1–8:49 (2008)poliMedia: The polimedia video-lecture repository (2007), http://media.upv.esSainz, I., Erro, D., Navas, E., Hernáez, I., Sánchez, J., Saratxaga, I.: Aholab speech synthesizer for albayzin 2012 speech synthesis evaluation. In: Proc. of IberSPEECH, pp. 645–652 (2012)Seide, F., Li, G., Chen, X., Yu, D.: Feature engineering in context-dependent dnn for conversational speech transcription. In: Proc. of ASRU, pp. 24–29 (2011)Shinoda, K., Watanabe, T.: MDL-based context-dependent subword modeling for speech recognition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan 21(2), 79–86 (2000)Silvestre-Cerdà, J.A., et al.: Translectures. In: Proc. of IberSPEECH, pp. 345–351 (2012)TED Ideas worth spreading, http://www.ted.comThe transLectures-UPV Team.: The transLectures-UPV toolkit (TLK), http://translectures.eu/tlkToda, T., Black, A.W., Tokuda, K.: Mapping from articulatory movements to vocal tract spectrum with Gaussian mixture model for articulatory speech synthesis. In: Proc. of ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (2004)Tokuda, K., Kobayashi, T., Imai, S.: Speech parameter generation from hmm using dynamic features. In: Proc. of ICASSP, vol. 1, pp. 660–663 (1995)Tokuda, K., Masuko, T., Miyazaki, N., Kobayashi, T.: Multi-space probability distribution HMM. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems 85(3), 455–464 (2002)transLectures: D3.1.2: Second report on massive adaptation, http://www.translectures.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/transLectures-D3.1.2-15Nov2013.pdfTurró, C., Ferrando, M., Busquets, J., Cañero, A.: Polimedia: a system for successful video e-learning. In: Proc. of EUNIS (2009)Videolectures.NET: Exchange ideas and share knowledge, http://www.videolectures.netWu, Y.J., King, S., Tokuda, K.: Cross-lingual speaker adaptation for HMM-based speech synthesis. In: Proc. of ISCSLP, pp. 1–4 (2008)Yamagishi, J.: An introduction to HMM-based speech synthesis. Tech. rep. Centre for Speech Technology Research (2006), https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/twiki/pub/CSTR/TrajectoryModelling/HTS-Introduction.pdfYoshimura, T., Tokuda, K., Masuko, T., Kobayashi, T., Kitamura, T.: Simultaneous modeling of spectrum, pitch and duration in HMM-based speech synthesis. In: Proc. of Eurospeech, pp. 2347–2350 (1999)Zen, H., Senior, A.: Deep mixture density networks for acoustic modeling in statistical parametric speech synthesis. In: Proc. of ICASSP, pp. 3872–3876 (2014)Zen, H., Senior, A., Schuster, M.: Statistical parametric speech synthesis using deep neural networks. In: Proc. of ICASSP, pp. 7962–7966 (2013)Zen, H., Tokuda, K., Black, A.W.: Statistical parametric speech synthesis. Speech Communication 51(11), 1039–1064 (2009

Studies on noise robust automatic speech recognition

Noise in everyday acoustic environments such as cars, traffic environments, and cafeterias remains one of the main challenges in automatic speech recognition (ASR). As a research theme, it has received wide attention in conferences and scientific journals focused on speech technology. This article collection reviews both the classic and novel approaches suggested for noise robust ASR. The articles are literature reviews written for the spring 2009 seminar course on noise robust automatic speech recognition (course code T-61.6060) held at TKK

Development of the Slovak HMM-Based TTS System and Evaluation of Voices in Respect to the Used Vocoding Techniques

This paper describes the development of a Slovak text-to-speech system which applies a technique wherein speech is directly synthesized from hidden Markov models. Statistical models for Slovak speech units are trained by using the newly created female and male phonetically balanced speech corpora. In addition, contextual informations about phonemes, syllables, words, phrases, and utterances were determined, as well as questions for decision tree-based context clustering algorithms. In this paper, recent statistical parametric speech synthesis methods including the conventional, STRAIGHT and AHOcoder speech synthesis systems are implemented and evaluated. Objective evaluation methods (mel-cepstral distortion and fundamental frequency comparison) and subjective ones (mean opinion score and semantically unpredictable sentences test) are carried out to compare these systems with each other and evaluation of their overall quality. The result of this work is a set of text to speech systems for Slovak language which are characterized by very good intelligibility and quite good naturalness of utterances at the output of these systems. In the subjective tests of intelligibility the STRAIGHT based female voice and AHOcoder based male voice reached the highest scores

Recent development of the HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS)

A statistical parametric approach to speech synthesis based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) has grown in popularity over the last few years. In this approach, spectrum, excitation, and duration of speech are simultaneously modeled by context-dependent HMMs, and speech waveforms are generate from the HMMs themselves. Since December 2002, we have publicly released an open-source software toolkit named “HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS)” to provide a research and development toolkit for statistical parametric speech synthesis. This paper describes recent developments of HTS in detail, as well as future release plans