2022/01/26 by Shinnosuke Takamichi, Wataru Nakata, Takamichi, Shinnosuke +5 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Topic Modeling #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2201.10896
openalex publication_date 2022/01/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we construct a Japanese audiobook speech corpus called "J-MAC" for speech synthesis research. With the success of reading-style speech synthesis, the research target is shifting to tasks that use complicated contexts. Audiobook speech synthesis is a good example that requires cross-sentence, expressiveness, etc. Unlike reading-style speech, speaker-specific expressiveness in audiobook speech also becomes the context. To enhance this research, we propose a method of constructing a corpus from audiobooks read by professional speakers. From many audiobooks and their texts, our method can automatically extract and refine the data without any language dependency. Specifically, we use vocal-instrumental separation to extract clean data, connectionist temporal classification to roughly align text and audio, and voice activity detection to refine the alignment. J-MAC is open-sourced in our project page. We also conduct audiobook speech synthesis evaluations, and the results give insights into audiobook speech synthesis.