Development of Community-Oriented Text-to-Speech Models for Māori ‘Avaiki Nui (Cook Islands Māori)
Jesin James, Rolando Coto-Solano, Sally Akevai Nicholas, Joshua Zhu, Bovey Yu, Fuki Babasaki, Jenny Tyler Wang, Nicholas Derby
Abstract
In this paper we describe the development of a text-to-speech system for Māori ‘Avaiki Nui (Cook Islands Māori). We provide details about the process of community-collaboration that was followed throughout the project, a continued engagement where we are trying to develop speech and language technology for the benefit of the community. During this process we gathered a group of recordings that we used to train a TTS system. When training we used two approaches, the HMM-system MaryTTS (Schröder et al., 2011) and the deep learning system FastSpeech2 (Ren et al., 2020). We performed two evaluation tasks on the models: First, we measured their quality by having the synthesized speech transcribed by ASR. The human produced ground truth had lower error rates (CER=4.3, WER=18), but the FastSpeech2 audio has lower error rates (CER=11.8 and WER=42.7) than the MaryTTS voice (CER=17.9 and WER=48.1). The second evaluation was a survey amongst speakers of the language so they could judge the voice’s quality. The ground truth was rated with the highest quality (MOS=4.6), but the FastSpeech2 voice had an overall quality of MOS=3.2, which was significantly higher than that of the MaryTTS synthesized recordings (MOS=2.0). We intend to use the FastSpeech2 model to create language learning tools for community members both on the Cook Islands and in the diaspora.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.432
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4820–4831
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.432
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jesin James, Rolando Coto-Solano, Sally Akevai Nicholas, Joshua Zhu, Bovey Yu, Fuki Babasaki, Jenny Tyler Wang, and Nicholas Derby. 2024. Development of Community-Oriented Text-to-Speech Models for Māori ‘Avaiki Nui (Cook Islands Māori). In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4820–4831, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Development of Community-Oriented Text-to-Speech Models for Māori ‘Avaiki Nui (Cook Islands Māori) (James et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.432.pdf