Browsing by Author "Hsieh, Chiao-Hua"

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A New Approach of Speaking Rate Modeling for Mandarin Speech Prosody
(2012)
Hsieh, Chiao-Hua
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Chiang, Chen-Yu
;
Wang, Yih-Ru
;
Yu, Hsiu-Min
;
Chen, Sin-Horng
A new approach of Mandarin-speech prosody modeling to consider the effects of speaking rate is proposed. The approach is a modification of our previous prosody labeling and modeling method to take speaking rate as a continuous independent variable and let prosodic-acoustic features and some parameters of prosodic models depend on it in order to count its influences. A speaking rate-dependent hierarchical prosodic model is hence constructed from four speech corpora of a single female speaker with fast, normal, medium and slow speaking rates. An analysis of the effects of speaking rate on the model parameters showed that they agreed well with our prior knowledge. So, the proposed approach provides a systematic and effective way to quantify the effects of speaking rate on Mandarin-speech prosody.
A SPEAKING RATE-CONTROLLED MANDARIN TTS SYSTEM
(2013)
Hsieh, Chiao-Hua
;
Wang, Yih-Ru
;
Chiang, Chen-Yu
;
Chen, Sin-Horng
;
電子工程學系及電子研究所
In this paper, a new speaking rate-controlled Mandarin TTS system based on a speaking rate-dependent hierarchical prosodic model (SR-HPM) [6] is proposed. In the training phase, a data-driven approach is employed to automatically build the SR-HPM directly from a large prosody-unlabeled speech database containing utterances of various speaking rates. The SR-HPM comprises 15 sub-models designed to describe various relationships among 3 types of prosodic-acoustic features of speech utterances, two types of prosodic tags specifying a 4-layer prosody hierarchy, linguistic features of various levels of the associated texts, and the speaking rates. In the test phase, the SR-HPM is employed to generate 4 prosodic-acoustic features, including syllable pitch contours, syllable durations, syllable energy levels, and syllable juncture pause durations. Combining these prosodic features with the spectral features generated by the HTS synthesizer, the system can generate natural speech for any speaking rate in a wide range of 0.15-0.3 seconds/syllable. A distinct feature of the system to control the occurrence frequencies of breaks of various types as well as their pause durations according to the given speaking rate was demonstrated. A subjective test showed that MOS scores of 3.35, 3.44 and 3.28 were achieved respectively for fast (SR= 0.17 sec/syllable), medium (SR=0.2 sec/syllable) and slow (SR= 0.25 sec/syllable) synthetic speeches.
Modeling of Speaking Rate Influences on Mandarin Speech Prosody and Its Application to Speaking Rate-controlled TTS
(2014-07-01)
Chen, Sin-Horng
;
Hsieh, Chiao-Hua
;
Chiang, Chen-Yu
;
Hsiao, Hsi-Chun
;
Wang, Yih-Ru
A new data-driven approach to building a speaking rate-dependent hierarchical prosodic model (SR-HPM), directly from a large prosody-unlabeled speech database containing utterances of various speaking rates, to describe the influences of speaking rate on Mandarin speech prosody is proposed. It is an extended version of the existing HPM model which contains 12 sub-models to describe various relationships of prosodic-acoustic features of speech signal, linguistic features of the associated text, and prosodic tags representing the prosodic structure of speech. Two main modifications are suggested. One is designing proper normalization functions from the statistics of the whole database to compensate the influences of speaking rate on all prosodic-acoustic features. Another is modifying the HPM training to let its parameters be speaking-rate dependent. Experimental results on a large Mandarin read speech corpus showed that the parameters of the SR-HPM together with these feature normalization functions interpreted the effects of speaking rate on Mandarin speech prosody very well. An application of the SR-HPM to design and implement a speaking rate-controlled Mandarin TTS system is demonstrated. The system can generate natural synthetic speech for any given speaking rate in a wide range of 3.4-6.8 syllables/sec. Two subjective tests, MOS and preference test, were conducted to compare the proposed system with the popular HTS system. The MOS scores of the proposed system were in the range of 3.58-3.83 for eight different speaking rates, while they were in 3.09-3.43 for HTS. Besides, the proposed system had higher preference scores (49.8%-79.6%) than those (9.8%-30.7%) of HTS. This confirmed the effectiveness of the speaking rate control method of the proposed TTS system.