EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Keeping Rare Events Rare

Ove Andersen, Charles Hoequist

Aalborg University, Denmark

It has been claimed that corpus-based TTS is unworkable because it is not practical to include representative units to cover all or most of the combinations of segments and prosodic characteristics found in general texts, a problem characterized as Large Numbers of Rare Events (LNRE). We argue that part of this problem is in its formulation, and that a closer look, including investigations into corpus-based TTS for Danish, show that LNRE need not be a fatal problem for inventory design in corpus-based TTS.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Andersen, Ove / Hoequist, Charles (2003): "Keeping rare events rare", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 1337-1340.