ISCA Archive - Perpetually optimizing the cost function for unit selection in a TTS system with one single run of MOS evaluation (original) (raw)

Perpetually optimizing the cost function for unit selection in a TTS system with one single run of MOS evaluation

Hu Peng, Yong Zhao, Min Chu

This paper proposes a method for optimizing the cost function for unit selection in the corpus-based TTS system by maximizing the correlation between the concatenative cost and the MOS. To do this, a subjective evaluation should be done first. The key point is to log the contextual information of all units appearing in the synthetic utterances evaluated. With this log file, concatenative cost can be recalculated with a cost function in any new definition. Then, the correlation between cost and MOS can serve as a measure for the validity of any change in the cost function, and the cost function is optimized perpetually without any new MOS evaluation. In this paper, the correlation coefficient between cost and MOS improves from -0.822 to -0.897 after optimization.