An Objective Evaluation Framework for Pathological Speech Synthesis
Conference: Speech Communication - 14th ITG Conference
09/29/2021 - 10/01/2021 at online
Proceedings: ITG-Fb. 298: Speech Communication
Pages: 5Language: englishTyp: PDF
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Authors:
Halpern, Bence Mark (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam & Multimedia Computing Group, Delft University of Technology, Delft & Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Fritsch, Julian; Hermann, Enno (Idiap Research Institute, Martigny & École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland)
van Son, Rob (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam & Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Scharenborg, Odette (Multimedia Computing Group, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands)
Magimai-Doss, Mathew (Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland)
Abstract:
The development of pathological speech systems is currently hindered by the lack of a standardised objective evaluation framework. In this work, we utilise existing detection and analysis techniques to propose a general framework for the consistent evaluation of synthetic pathological speech. This framework evaluates the voice quality and the intelligibility aspects of speech and is shown to be complementary using our experiments. Using our proposed evaluation framework, we develop and test a dysarthric voice conversion system (VC) using CycleGAN-VC and a PSOLA-based speech rate modification technique. We show that the developed system is able to synthesise dysarthric speech with different levels of speech intelligibility.