{"title":"Sparse representation of phonetic features for voice conversion with and without parallel data","authors":"Berrak Sisman, Haizhou Li, K. Tan","doi":"10.1109/ASRU.2017.8269002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a voice conversion framework that uses phonetic information in an exemplar-based voice conversion approach. The proposed idea is motivated by the fact that phone-dependent exemplars lead to better estimation of activation matrix, therefore, possibly better conversion. We propose to use the phone segmentation results from automatic speech recognition (ASR) to construct a sub-dictionary for each phone. The proposed framework can work with or without parallel training data. With parallel training data, we found that phonetic sub-dictionary outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline in objective and subjective evaluations. Without parallel training data, we use Phonetic PosteriorGrams (PPGs) as the speaker-independent exemplars in the phonetic sub-dictionary to serve as a bridge between speakers. We report that such technique achieves a competitive performance without the need of parallel training data.","PeriodicalId":290868,"journal":{"name":"2017 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU)","volume":"13 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"40","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2017 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASRU.2017.8269002","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 40
Abstract
This paper presents a voice conversion framework that uses phonetic information in an exemplar-based voice conversion approach. The proposed idea is motivated by the fact that phone-dependent exemplars lead to better estimation of activation matrix, therefore, possibly better conversion. We propose to use the phone segmentation results from automatic speech recognition (ASR) to construct a sub-dictionary for each phone. The proposed framework can work with or without parallel training data. With parallel training data, we found that phonetic sub-dictionary outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline in objective and subjective evaluations. Without parallel training data, we use Phonetic PosteriorGrams (PPGs) as the speaker-independent exemplars in the phonetic sub-dictionary to serve as a bridge between speakers. We report that such technique achieves a competitive performance without the need of parallel training data.