Burmese Speech Corpus, Finite-State Text Normalization and Pronunciation Grammars with an Application to Text-to-Speech

Yin May Oo, Theeraphol Wattanavekin, Chenfang Li, Pasindu De Silva, Supheakmungkol Sarin, Knot Pipatsrisawat, Martin Jansche, Oddur Kjartansson, Alexander Gutkin

Abstract
This paper introduces an open-source crowd-sourced multi-speaker speech corpus along with the comprehensive set of finite-state transducer (FST) grammars for performing text normalization for the Burmese (Myanmar) language. We also introduce the open-source finite-state grammars for performing grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Burmese. These three components are necessary (but not sufficient) for building a high-quality text-to-speech (TTS) system for Burmese, a tonal Southeast Asian language from the Sino-Tibetan family which presents several linguistic challenges. We describe the corpus acquisition process and provide the details of our finite state-based approach to Burmese text normalization and G2P. Our experiments involve building a multi-speaker TTS system based on long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) models, which were previously shown to perform well for other languages in a low-resource setting. Our results indicate that the data and grammars that we are announcing are sufficient to build reasonably high-quality models comparable to other systems. We hope these resources will facilitate speech and language research on the Burmese language, which is considered by many to be low-resource due to the limited availability of free linguistic data.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.777
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6328–6339
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.777
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yin May Oo, Theeraphol Wattanavekin, Chenfang Li, Pasindu De Silva, Supheakmungkol Sarin, Knot Pipatsrisawat, Martin Jansche, Oddur Kjartansson, and Alexander Gutkin. 2020. Burmese Speech Corpus, Finite-State Text Normalization and Pronunciation Grammars with an Application to Text-to-Speech. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6328–6339, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Burmese Speech Corpus, Finite-State Text Normalization and Pronunciation Grammars with an Application to Text-to-Speech (Oo et al., LREC 2020)
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