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Towards Fully Automatic Annotation of Audio Books for TTS

Building speech corpora is a first and crucial step for every text-to-speech synthesis system. Nowadays, the use of statistical models implies the use of huge sized corpora that need to be recorded, transcribed, annotated and segmented to be usable. The variety of corpora necessary for recent applications (content, style, etc.) makes the use of existing digital audio resources very attractive. Among all available resources, audiobooks, considering their quality, are interesting. Considering this framework, we propose a complete acquisition, segmentation and annotation chain for audiobooks that tends to be fully automatic. The proposed process relies on a data structure, Roots, that establishes the relations between the different annotation levels represented as sequences of items. This methodology has been applied successfully on 11 hours of speech extracted from an audiobook. A manual check, on a part of the corpus, shows the efficiency of the process.