A pitch-contour model adaptation method for integrated synthesis of Mandarin, Min-Nan, and Hakka speech

In this paper, a pitch-contour model adaptation method is developed for integrated synthesis of Mandarin, Min-Nan, and Hakka speech. The goal is to reduce the repeated efforts of constructing an independent model for each language. In practice, our approach is to construct just one working pitch-contour model from Min-Nan language's training sentences. Then, this model is adapted to generate pitch-contours for the other two languages. Since model adaptation is done in a way that model parameters are not modified, hence no training data from the other two languages are required. To test the proposed model adaptation method, we insert the developed program modules into a previously built speech synthesis system to synthesize speech of the three languages. Initial evaluation shows that the generated pitch-contours for Mandarin and Hakka are perceptually acceptable and the degradation in intonation presentation is very small. Therefore, our approach is feasible in practice.