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Vergina: A Modern Greek Speech Database for Speech Synthesis

The present paper outlines the Vergina speech database, which was developed in support of research and development of corpus-based unit selection and statistical parametric speech synthesis systems for Modern Greek language. In the following, we describe the design, development and implementation of the recording campaign, as well as the annotation of the database. Specifically, a text corpus of approximately 5 million words, collected from newspaper articles, periodicals, and paragraphs of literature, was processed in order to select the utterances-sentences needed for producing the speech database and to achieve a reasonable phonetic coverage. The broad coverage and contents of the selected utterances-sentences of the database ― text corpus collected from different domains and writing styles ― makes this database appropriate for various application domains. The database, recorded in audio studio, consists of approximately 3,000 phonetically balanced Modern Greek utterances corresponding to approximately four hours of speech. Annotation of the Vergina speech database was performed using task-specific tools, which are based on a hidden Markov model (HMM) segmentation method, and then manual inspection and corrections were performed.