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| An Improved Cross-Language Model Adaptation Method for Speech Synthesis |
| LIU Hang, LING Zhen-Hua, GUO Wu, DAI Li-Rong |
| iFLYTEK Speech Laboratory,Department of Electronic Engineering and Information Science,University of Science and Technology of China,Hefei 230027 |
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Abstract Cross-language model adaptation in statistical parametric speech synthesis is used for rapidly constructing a text-to-speech (TTS) system with the target speakers characteristics when the source and the target speakers languages are different. In this paper, the conventional cross-language adaptation method based on phone-mapping and triphone models is improved by two means. Firstly, phone mapping combined with data-selection is adopted to improve its reliability. Secondly, cross-language prosodic information mapping is introduced to make use of prosodic information, which is ignored in the triphone model. Experiments on Chinese-to-English adaptation show that the synthesized speech using the improved method has much better naturalness and speaker similarity compared with the result of conventional method.
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Received: 02 June 2010
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2011, Vol. 24 
