Browsing by Author "Yu, Hsiu-Min"

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A Hakka text-to-speech system
(2006)
Yu, Hsiu-Min
;
Hwang, Hsin-Te
;
Lin, Dong-Yi
;
Chen, Sin-Horng
;
電信工程研究所
In this paper, the implementation of a Hakka text-to-speech (TIS) system is presented. The system is designed based on the same principle of developing a Mandarin and a Min-Nan TTS systems proposed previously. It takes 671 base-syllables as basic synthesis units and uses a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based prosody generator to generate proper prosodic parameters for synthesizing natural output speech. The whole system is implemented by software and runs in real-time on PC. Informal subjective listening test confirmed that the system performed well. All synthetic speeches sounded well for well-tokenized texts and fair for texts with automatic tokenization.
A New Approach of Speaking Rate Modeling for Mandarin Speech Prosody
(2012)
Hsieh, Chiao-Hua
;
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.
An Automatic Prosody Labeling Method for Mandarin Speech
(2007)
Chiang, Chen-Yu
;
Yu, Hsiu-Min
;
Wang, Yih-Ru
;
Chen, Sin-Horng
;
電信工程研究所
A new model-based automatic prosody labeling method for Mandarin speech is proposed. It first introduces four models to describe the relationships of the prosody tags to be labeled, the prosodic features of the speech signals, and the linguistic features of the associated texts. It then employs a sequential optimization procedure to estimate parameters of these four models and find all prosody tags. Experimental results on the Sinica Tree-Bank corpus showed that most prosody tags labeled were meaningful and the estimated parameters of these four models matched well with our a priori knowledge about Mandarin prosody.
An Investigation on the Mandarin Prosody of a Parallel Multi-Speaking Rate Speech Corpus
(2009)
Chiang, Chen-Yu
;
Tang, Cheng-Chang
;
Yu, Hsiu-Min
;
Wang, Yih-Ru
;
Chen, Sin-Horng
In this paper, the prosody of a parallel multi-speaking rate Mandarin read speech corpus is investigated. The corpus contains four parallel speech datasets uttered by a female professional announcer with various speech rates (SRs) of 4.40 (fast), 3.82 (normal), 2.97 (median) and 2.45 (slow) syllables/second. By using the unsupervised joint prosody labeling and modeling (PLM) method proposed previously, the relationship between SR and various prosodic features, including pause duration, patterns of three high-level prosodic constituents, and the break labels, are investigated. The analyses reported in this study could be very informative in developing prosody generation mechanism for text-to-speech and prosody modeling for automatic speech recognition in various SRs.
Exploration of high-level prosodic patterns for continuous Mandarin speech
(2008)
Chiang, Chen-Yu
;
Yu, Hsiu-Min
;
Wang, Yih-Ru
;
Chen, Sin-Horng
;
電信工程研究所
In this paper, the high-level prosodic patterns of prosodic word (PW), prosodic phrase (PPh) and breath group/prosodic phrase group (BG/PG) for syllable pitch-level and duration are explored using an automatic joint prosody labeling and modeling method. Experimental results on a treebank speech corpus showed that the explored high-level prosodic patterns not only matched well with our a priori knowledge about Mandarin prosody, but also conformed well to other previous studies. They can therefore be integrated to form a meaningful Mandarin prosody hierarchy.
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.
Multilingual speech corpora for TTS system development
(2006)
Hsiao, Hsi-Chun
;
Yu, Hsiu-Min
;
Wang, Yih-Ru
;
Chen, Sin-Horng
;
電信工程研究所
In this paper, four speech corpora collected in the Speech Lab of NCTU in recent years are discussed. They include a Mandarin tree-bank speech corpus, a Min-Nan speech corpus, a Hakka speech corpus, and a Chinese-English mixed speech corpus. Currently, they are used separately to develop a corpus-based Mandarin TTS system, a Min-Nan TTS system, a Hakka TTS system, and a Chinese-English bilingual TTS system. These systems will be integrated in the future to construct a multilingual TTS system covering the four primary languages used in Taiwan.
Unsupervised joint prosody labeling and modeling for Mandarin speech
(2009-02-01)
Chiang, Chen-Yu
;
Chen, Sin-Horng
;
Yu, Hsiu-Min
;
Wang, Yih-Ru
;
電信工程研究所
An unsupervised joint prosody labeling and modeling method for Mandarin speech is proposed, a new scheme intended to construct statistical prosodic models and to label prosodic tags consistently for Mandarin speech. Two types of prosodic tags are determined by four prosodic models designed to illustrate the hierarchy of Mandarin prosody: the break of a syllable juncture to demarcate prosodic constituents and the prosodic state to represent any prosodic domain's pitch-level variation resulting from its upper-layered prosodic constituents' influences. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated using an unlabeled read-speech corpus articulated by an experienced female announcer. Experimental results showed that the estimated parameters of the four prosodic models were able to explore and describe the structures and patterns of Mandarin prosody. Besides, certain corresponding relationships between the break indices labeled and the associated words were found, and manifested the connections between prosodic and linguistic parameters, a finding further verifying the capability of the method presented. Finally, a quantitative comparison in labeling results between the proposed method and human labelers indicated that the former was more consistent and discriminative than the latter in prosodic feature distributions, a merit of the method developed here on the applications of prosody modeling. (C) 2009 Acoustical Society of America. [DOI:10.1121/1.3056559]