Automatic Segmentation of Parasitic Sounds in Speech Corpora for TTS Synthesis

In this paper, automatic segmentation of parasitic speech sounds in speech corpora for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is presented. The automatic segmentation is, beside the automatic detection of the presence of such sounds in speech corpora, an important step in the precise localisation of parasitic sounds in speech corpora. The main goal of this study is to find out whether the segmentation of these sounds is accurate enough to enable cutting the sounds out of synthetic speech or explicit modelling of these sounds during synthesis. HMM-based classifier was employed to detect the parasitic sounds and to find the boundaries between these sounds and the surrounding phones simultaneously. The results show that the automatic segmentation of parasitic sounds is comparable to the segmentation of other phones, which indicates that the cutting out or the explicit usage of parasitic sounds should be possible.