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
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.432
DOI:
Bibkey:
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)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.432.pdf