Title :
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
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;
Conference_Titel :
Signal Processing (ICSP), 2010 IEEE 10th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Beijing
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-5897-4
DOI :
10.1109/ICOSP.2010.5655862
