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KazakhTTS2: Extending the Open-Source Kazakh TTS Corpus With More Data, Speakers, and Topics

    • Nazarbayev University

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    Abstract

    We present an expanded version of our previously released Kazakh text-to-speech (KazakhTTS) synthesis corpus. In the new KazakhTTS2 corpus, the overall size has increased from 93 hours to 271 hours, the number of speakers has risen from two to five (three females and two males), and the topic coverage has been diversified with the help of new sources, including a book and Wikipedia articles. This corpus is necessary for building high-quality TTS systems for Kazakh, a Central Asian agglutinative language from the Turkic family, which presents several linguistic challenges. We describe the corpus construction process and provide the details of the training and evaluation procedures for the TTS system. Our experimental results indicate that the constructed corpus is sufficient to build robust TTS models for real-world applications, with a subjective mean opinion score ranging from 3.6 to 4.2 for all the five speakers. We believe that our corpus will facilitate speech and language research for Kazakh and other Turkic languages, which are widely considered to be low-resource due to the limited availability of free linguistic data. The constructed corpus, code, and pretrained models are publicly available in our GitHub repository.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publication2022 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022
    EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Frederic Bechet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
    PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
    Pages5404-5411
    Number of pages8
    ISBN (Electronic)9791095546726
    Publication statusPublished - 2022
    Event13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022 - Marseille, France
    Duration: Jun 20 2022Jun 25 2022

    Publication series

    Name2022 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022

    Conference

    Conference13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC 2022
    Country/TerritoryFrance
    CityMarseille
    Period6/20/226/25/22

    Keywords

    • agglutinative
    • Kazakh
    • open-source
    • speech corpus
    • speech synthesis
    • text-to-speech
    • TTS
    • Turkic

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Language and Linguistics
    • Library and Information Sciences
    • Linguistics and Language
    • Education

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