Exploration strategies for articulatory synthesis of complex syllable onsets
This addresses the difficulty and time-consuming nature of manual mapping development for articulatory speech synthesis, applicable in speech science and technology, though it appears incremental as a first step.
The paper tackled the problem of developing mappings from linguistic specifications to articulatory gestures for speech synthesis by constructing an optimization-based framework to learn these mappings automatically, demonstrating production of syllables with complex onsets and evaluating gesture quality regarding coarticulation.
High-quality articulatory speech synthesis has many potential applications in speech science and technology. However, developing appropriate mappings from linguistic specification to articulatory gestures is difficult and time consuming. In this paper we construct an optimisation-based framework as a first step towards learning these mappings without manual intervention. We demonstrate the production of syllables with complex onsets and discuss the quality of the articulatory gestures with reference to coarticulation.