Fifth ISCA ITRW on Speech Synthesis June 14-16, 2004 Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Impact of Durational Outlier Removal from Unit Selection Catalogs

John Kominek, Alan W. Black

Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Outlier removal is a straightforward technique for improving the quality of unit selection catalogs without hand correction. This paper investigates the use of phone durations as a criteria for removing bad units. Scoring conditioned on linguistic context demonstrably better than statistics based on phone class alone. The impact of voice modification is evaluated with a 444K utterance test corpus.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kominek, John / Black, Alan W. (2004): "Impact of durational outlier removal from unit selection catalogs", In SSW5-2004, 155-160.