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http://dx.doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2021.13.3.065

Designing a large recording script for open-domain English speech synthesis  

Kim, Sunhee (Department of French Language Education, Seoul National University)
Kim, Hojeong (Department of Foreign Language Education, Seoul National University)
Lee, Yooseop (Department of French Language Education, Seoul National University)
Kim, Boryoung (Department of French Language Education, Seoul National University)
Won, Yongkook (Center for Educational Research, Seoul National University)
Kim, Bongwan (Kakao Enterprise Corp.)
Publication Information
Phonetics and Speech Sciences / v.13, no.3, 2021 , pp. 65-70 More about this Journal
Abstract
This paper proposes a method for designing a large recording script for open domain English speech synthesis. For read-aloud style text, 12 domains and 294 sub-domains were designed using text contained in five different news media publications. For conversational style text, 4 domains and 36 sub-domains were designed using movie subtitles. The final script consists of 43,013 sentences, 27,085 read-aloud style sentences, and 15,928 conversational style sentences, consisting of 549,683 tokens and 38,356 types. The completed script is analyzed using four criteria: word coverage (type coverage and token coverage), high-frequency vocabulary coverage, phonetic coverage (diphone coverage and triphone coverage), and readability. The type coverage of our script reaches 36.86% despite its low token coverage of 2.97%. The high-frequency vocabulary coverage of the script is 73.82%, and the diphone coverage and triphone coverage of the whole script is 86.70% and 38.92%, respectively. The average readability of whole sentences is 9.03. The results of analysis show that the proposed method is effective in producing a large recording script for English speech synthesis, demonstrating good coverage in terms of unique words, high-frequency vocabulary, phonetic units, and readability.
Keywords
recording script; speech synthesis; English; word coverage; phonetic coverage; readability;
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