Abstract
This paper presents the design, collection and verification of a bilingual text-to-speech synthesis corpus for Welsh and English. The ever expanding voice collection currently contains almost 10 hours of recordings from a bilingual, phonetically balanced text corpus. The speakers consist of a professional voice actor and three amateur contributors, with male and female accents from north and south Wales. This corpus provides audio-text pairs for building and training high-quality bilingual Welsh-English neural based TTS systems. We describe the process by which we created a phonetically balanced prompt set and the challenges of attempting to collate such a dataset during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our initial findings in validating the corpus via the implementation of a state-of-the-art TTS models are presented. This corpus represents the first open-source Welsh language corpus large enough to capitalise on neural TTS architectures.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.cltw-1.15
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 4th Celtic Language Technology Workshop within LREC2022
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Venue:
- CLTW
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 104–109
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.cltw-1.15
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Stephen Russell, Dewi Jones, and Delyth Prys. 2022. BU-TTS: An Open-Source, Bilingual Welsh-English, Text-to-Speech Corpus. In Proceedings of the 4th Celtic Language Technology Workshop within LREC2022, pages 104–109, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- BU-TTS: An Open-Source, Bilingual Welsh-English, Text-to-Speech Corpus (Russell et al., CLTW 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/2022.cltw-1.15.pdf
- Data
- LJSpeech