Further Investigation of MDS as a Tool for Evaluation of Speech Quality of Synthesized Speech

Abstract

The dissertation investigates MDS as a tool for the evaluation of the quality of synthesized speech. More specifically, it investigates the relations between Weighted Euclidean Distance Scaling and Simple Euclidean Distance Scaling, and how aggregating data affects the MDS configuration. It is investigated to what extent a subset of experimental participants and/or experimental stimuli are representative of a larger test set. For that purpose an experiment was conducted on the basis of a subset of stimuli used in the Blizzard Challenge 2008. Issues in the evaluation of Speech Synthesis are discussed and an overview of the basics of multi-dimensional scaling is given to an extent that allows comprehension of methods used in the application of Multi-dimensional scaling to speech synthesis evaluation. Based on the experimental findings, further experiments are suggested with the goal in mind that testing procedures can be optimized to such an extent that the number of experimental participants can be drastically reduced

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