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SynPaFlex-Corpus: An Expressive French Audiobooks Corpus dedicated to expressive speech synthesis.

This paper presents an expressive French audiobooks corpus containing eighty seven hours of good audio quality speech, recorded by a single amateur speaker reading audiobooks of different literary genres. This corpus departs from existing corpora collected from audiobooks since they usually provide a few hours of mono-genre and multi-speaker speech. The motivation for setting up such a corpus is to explore expressiveness from different perspectives, such as discourse styles, prosody, and pronunciation, and using different levels of analysis (syllable, prosodic and lexical words, prosodic and syntactic phrases, utterance or paragraph). This will allow developing models to better control expressiveness in speech synthesis, and to adapt pronunciation and prosody to specific discourse settings (changes in discourse perspectives, indirect vs. direct styles, etc.). To this end, the corpus has been annotated automatically and provides information as phone labels, phone boundaries, syllables, words or morpho-syntactic tagging. Moreover, a significant part of the corpus has also been annotated manually to encode direct/indirect speech information and emotional content. The corpus is already usable for studies on prosody and TTS purposes and is available to the community.