TUNDRA: A Multilingual Corpus of Found Data for TTS Research Created with Light Supervision

Abstract Simple4All Tundra (version 1.0) is the first release of a standardised multilingual corpus designed for text-to-speech research with imperfect or found data. The corpus consists of approximately 60 hours of speech data from audiobooks in 14 languages, as well as utterance-level alignments o...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: A Stan, O Watts, Y Mamiya, M Giurgiu, R A J Clark, J Yamagishi, S King
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1081.2704
http://www.adrianastan.com/papers/2013_IS_MLAB.pdf
Description
Summary:Abstract Simple4All Tundra (version 1.0) is the first release of a standardised multilingual corpus designed for text-to-speech research with imperfect or found data. The corpus consists of approximately 60 hours of speech data from audiobooks in 14 languages, as well as utterance-level alignments obtained with a lightly-supervised process. Future versions of the corpus will include finer-grained alignment and prosodic annotation, all of which will be made freely available. This paper gives a general outline of the data collected so far, as well as a detailed description of how this has been done, emphasizing the minimal language-specific knowledge and manual intervention used to compile the corpus. To demonstrate its potential use, textto-speech systems have been built for all languages using unsupervised or lightly supervised methods, also briefly presented in the paper.