Santiago Planet

Automatic refinement of an expressive speech corpus assembling subjective perception and automatic classification

This paper presents an automatic system able to enhance expressiveness in speech corpora recorded from acted or stimulated speech. The system is trained with the results of a subjective evaluation carried out on a reduced set of the original corpus. Once the system has been trained, it is able to check the complete corpus and perform an automatic pruning of the unclear utterances, i.e. with expressive styles which are different from the intended corpus. The content which most closely matches the subjective classification remains in the resulting corpus. An expressive speech corpus in Spanish, designed and recorded for speech synthesis purposes, has been used to test the presented proposal. The automatic refinement has been applied to the whole corpus and the result has been validated with a second subjective test.

Objective and subjective evaluation of an expressive speech corpus

This paper presents the validation of the expressiveness of an acted oral corpus produced to be used in speech synthesis. Firstly, an objective validation has been conducted by means of automatic emotion identification techniques using statistical features extracted from the prosodic parameters of speech. Secondly, a listening test has been performed with a subset of utterances. The relationship between both objective and subjective evaluations is analyzed and the obtained conclusions can be useful to improve the following steps related to expressive speech synthesis.

Validation of an expressive speech corpus by mapping automatic classification to subjective evaluation

This paper presents the validation of the expressive content of an acted corpus produced to be used in speech synthesis. The use of acted speech can be rather lacking in authenticity and therefore its expressiveness validation is required. The goal is to obtain an automatic classifier able to prune the bad utterances -with wrong expressiveness-. Firstly, a subjective test has been conducted with almost ten percent of the corpus utterances. Secondly, objective techniques have been carried out by means of automatic identification of emotions using different algorithms applied to statistical features computed over the speech prosody. The relationship between both evaluations is achieved by an attribute selection process guided by a metric that measures the matching between the misclassified utterances by the users and the automatic process. The experiments show that this approach can be useful to provide a subset of utterances with poor or wrong expressive content.

Improving spontaneous children's emotion recognition by acoustic feature selection and feature-level fusion of acoustic and linguistic parameters

This paper presents an approach to improve emotion recognition from spontaneous speech. We used a wrapper method to reduce an acoustic set of features and feature-level fusion to merge them with a set of linguistic ones. The proposed system was evaluated with the FAU Aibo Corpus. We considered the same emotion set that was proposed in the Interspeech 2009 Emotion Challenge. The main contribution of this work is the improvement, with the reduced set of features, of the results obtained in this Challenge and the combination of the best ones. We built this set with a selection of 28 acoustic and 5 linguistic features and concatenation of the feature vectors from an original set of 389 parameters.