Resources for Speech Synthesis of Viennese Varieties

Michael Pucher, Friedrich Neubarth, Volker Strom, Sylvia Moosmüller, Gregor Hofer, Christian Kranzler, Gudrun Schuchmann, Dietmar Schabus


Abstract
This paper describes our work on developing corpora of three varieties of Viennese for unit selection speech synthesis. The synthetic voices for Viennese varieties, implemented with the open domain unit selection speech synthesis engine Multisyn of Festival will also be released within Festival. The paper especially focuses on two questions: how we selected the appropriate speakers and how we obtained the text sources needed for the recording of these non-standard varieties. Regarding the first one, it turned out that working with a ‘prototypical’ professional speaker was much more preferable than striving for authenticity. In addition, we give a brief outline about the differences between the Austrian standard and its dialectal varieties and how we solved certain technical problems that are related to these differences. In particular, the specific set of phones applicable to each variety had to be determined by applying various constraints. Since such a set does not serve any descriptive purposes but rather is influencing the quality of speech synthesis, a careful design of such a set was an important task.
Anthology ID:
L10-1249
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/361_Paper.pdf
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Cite (ACL):
Michael Pucher, Friedrich Neubarth, Volker Strom, Sylvia Moosmüller, Gregor Hofer, Christian Kranzler, Gudrun Schuchmann, and Dietmar Schabus. 2010. Resources for Speech Synthesis of Viennese Varieties. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Resources for Speech Synthesis of Viennese Varieties (Pucher et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/361_Paper.pdf