Context-adaptive phone boundary refining for a TTS database

A method for the automatic segmentation of speech signals is described. The method is dedicated to the construction of a large database for a Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis system. The main issue of the work involves the refinement of an initial estimation of phone boundaries which are provided by an alignment, based on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) was used as a phone boundary detector. To increase the performance of segmentation, a technique which individually trains an MLP according to phonetic transition is proposed. The optimum partitioning of the entire phonetic transition space is constructed from the standpoint of minimizing the overall deviation from hand labelling positions. With single speaker stimuli, the experimental results showed that more than 95% of all phone boundaries have a boundary deviation from the reference position smaller than 20 ms, and the refinement of the boundaries reduces the root mean square error by about 25%.