A method of multi-layered speech segmentation tailored for speech synthesis

This paper presents a speech segmentation scheme designed to be used in creating voice inventories for speech synthesis. Just the information about phoneme segments in a given speech corpus is not sufficient for speech synthesis, but multi-layers of segments such as breath groups, accent phrases, phonemes, and pitch-marks, are all necessary to reproduce the prosody and acoustics of a given speaker. The segmentation algorithm devised here has the capability of extracting the multi-layered segmental information in a distinctly organized fashion, and is fairly robust to speaker differences and speaking styles. The experimental evaluations with on speech corpora with a fairly large variation of speaking styles show that the speech segmentation algorithm is quite accurate and robust in extracting segments of both phonemes and accentual phrases.