A New Pruning Method for Synthesis Database Reduction Using Weighted Vector Quantization

A large-scale synthesis database for a unit selection based synthesis method usually retains redundant synthesis unit instances, which are useless to the synthetic speech quality. In this paper, to eliminate those instances from the synthesis database, we proposed a new pruning method called weighted vector quantization (WVQ). The WVQ reflects relative importance of each synthesis unit instance when clustering the similar instances using vector quantization (VQ) technique. The proposed method was compared with two conventional pruning methods through the objective and subjective evaluations of the synthetic speech quality: one to simply limit maximum number of instance, and the other based on normal VQ-based clustering. The proposed method showed the best performance under 50% reduction rates. Over 50% of reduction rates, the synthetic speech quality is not seriously but perceptibly degraded. Using the proposed method, the synthesis database can be efficiently reduced without serious degradation of the synthetic speech quality.