Enhancing Kurdish Text-to-Speech with Native Corpus Training: A High-Quality WaveGlow Vocoder Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Abdullah, Abdulhady Abas, Muhamad, Sabat Salih, Veisi, Hadi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Abdullah, Abdulhady Abas
Muhamad, Sabat Salih
Veisi, Hadi
author_facet Abdullah, Abdulhady Abas
Muhamad, Sabat Salih
Veisi, Hadi
contents The ability to synthesize spoken language from text has greatly facilitated access to digital content with the advances in text-to-speech technology. However, effective TTS development for low-resource languages, such as Central Kurdish (CKB), still faces many challenges due mainly to the lack of linguistic information and dedicated resources. In this paper, we improve the Kurdish TTS system based on Tacotron by training the Kurdish WaveGlow vocoder on a 21-hour central Kurdish speech corpus instead of using a pre-trained English vocoder WaveGlow. Vocoder training on the target language corpus is required to accurately and fluently adapt phonetic and prosodic changes in Kurdish language. The effectiveness of these enhancements is that our model is significantly better than the baseline system with English pretrained models. In particular, our adaptive WaveGlow model achieves an impressive MOS of 4.91, which sets a new benchmark for Kurdish speech synthesis. On one hand, this study empowers the advanced features of the TTS system for Central Kurdish, and on the other hand, it opens the doors for other dialects in Kurdish and other related languages to further develop.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_13734
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Kurdish Text-to-Speech with Native Corpus Training: A High-Quality WaveGlow Vocoder Approach
Abdullah, Abdulhady Abas
Muhamad, Sabat Salih
Veisi, Hadi
Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
The ability to synthesize spoken language from text has greatly facilitated access to digital content with the advances in text-to-speech technology. However, effective TTS development for low-resource languages, such as Central Kurdish (CKB), still faces many challenges due mainly to the lack of linguistic information and dedicated resources. In this paper, we improve the Kurdish TTS system based on Tacotron by training the Kurdish WaveGlow vocoder on a 21-hour central Kurdish speech corpus instead of using a pre-trained English vocoder WaveGlow. Vocoder training on the target language corpus is required to accurately and fluently adapt phonetic and prosodic changes in Kurdish language. The effectiveness of these enhancements is that our model is significantly better than the baseline system with English pretrained models. In particular, our adaptive WaveGlow model achieves an impressive MOS of 4.91, which sets a new benchmark for Kurdish speech synthesis. On one hand, this study empowers the advanced features of the TTS system for Central Kurdish, and on the other hand, it opens the doors for other dialects in Kurdish and other related languages to further develop.
title Enhancing Kurdish Text-to-Speech with Native Corpus Training: A High-Quality WaveGlow Vocoder Approach
topic Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.13734