NDLI: Developing Objective Measures of Foreign-Accent Conversion

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Felps, D. Gutierrez-Osuna, R.
Copyright Year	2006
Abstract	Various methods have recently appeared to transform foreign-accented speech into its native-accented counterpart. Evaluation of these accent conversion methods requires extensive listening tests across a number of perceptual dimensions. This article presents three objective measures that may be used to assess the acoustic quality, degree of foreign accent, and speaker identity of accent-converted utterances. Accent conversion generates novel utterances: those of a foreign speaker with a native accent. Therefore, the acoustic quality in accent conversion cannot be evaluated with conventional measures of spectral distortion, which assume that a clean recording of the speech signal is available for comparison. Here we evaluate a single-ended measure of speech quality, ITU-T recommendation P.563 for narrow-band telephony. We also propose a measure of foreign accent that exploits a weakness of automatic speech recognizers: their sensitivity to foreign accents. Namely, we use phoneme-level match scores given by the HTK recognizer trained on a large number of English American speakers to obtain a measure of native accent. Finally, we propose a measure of speaker identity that projects acoustic vectors (e.g., Mel cepstral, F0) onto the linear discriminant that maximizes separability for a given pair of source and target speakers. The three measures are evaluated on a corpus of accent-converted utterances that had been previously rated through perceptual tests. Our results show that the three measures have a high degree of correlation with their corresponding subjective ratings, suggesting that they may be used to accelerate the development of foreign-accent conversion tools. Applications of these measures in the context of computer assisted pronunciation training and voice conversion are also discussed.
Sponsorship	IEEE Signal Processing Society
Starting Page	1030
Ending Page	1040
Page Count	11
File Size	793491
File Format	PDF
ISSN	15587916
Volume Number	18
Issue Number	5
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2010-07-01
Publisher Place	U.S.A.
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Acoustic measurements Distortion measurement Loudspeakers Acoustic testing Speech analysis Acoustic distortion Narrowband Telephony Automatic speech recognition Vectors voice conversion Accent conversion foreign accent recognition speaker recognition
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Acoustics and Ultrasonics Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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