Knowledge versus data in TTS: evaluation of a continuum of synthesis systems

Abstract

Grapheme-based models have been proposed for both ASR and TTS as a way of circumventing the lack of expert-compiled pronunciation lexicons in under-resourced languages. It is a common observation that this should work well in languages employing orthographies with a transparent letter-to-phoneme relationship, such as Spanish. Our experience has shown, however, that there is still a significant difference in intelligibility between grapheme-based systems and conventional ones for this language. This paper explores the contribution of different levels of linguistic annotation to system intelligibility, and the trade-off between those levels and the quantity of data used for training. Ten systems spaced across these two continua of knowledge and data were subjectively evaluated for intelligibility.