FestCat: Speech Synthesis in Catalan using Festival

http://festcat.talp.cat
Antonio Bonafonte
TALP Research Center, UPC
Barcelona, November 2007

Requirements and installation

Read INSTALL.md or checkout our website instructions.

FestCat Usage

See USAGE.md to learn how to use FestCat.

About the FestCat project

"Festival parla català"

The FestCat package consists of a library providing analysis of Catalan text, and the data to extend Festival so that it can speak Catalan.

Basically, there are two components:

1. Linguistic data and code to extend Festival for Catalan. Dictionaries, tokenizer, lts rules, POStagger data, etc.

This includes two folders:

• dicts/upc (basically dictionaries)
• upc_catalan (basically code)

2. Voices: speaker dependent data.
   • There is one folder for each voice: festival/lib/voices/catalan/upc_ca_'speaker-name'

Several voices have already been developed. Check the web page to get the latest downloads.

About the authors

This project has been initially developped by the TALP Research Center, from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, at Barcelona. The recordings, most of the code and the data has been specifically developed for this project. The dictionaries are an exception.

Dictionaries

The main source for building the dictionaries is the Catalan lexicon provided by the FreeLing project, also developed by the TALP Research Center and others. Please visit the FreeLing web site for more information:

The lexicon has been enriched in the following way:

• Phonetic transcriptions have been automatically generated using the the TALP phonetic transcription toolkit

• New word forms have been added using frequent words found in our corpus and words found in our 'speech' data to ensure better coverage when designing the voices.

The gramatical model has been trained using the Free database Àncora-ca 2.0, developped at CLiC (Centre de Llenguatge i Computació) from Universitat de Barcelona.

Relevant Publicacions

• Antonio Bonafonte, Jordi Adell, Ignasi Esquerra, Silvia Gallego, Asunción Moreno, Javier Pérez "Corpus and Voices for Catalan Speech Synthesis", Proceedings of LREC Conference 2008, p.3325-3329

• Antonio Bonafonte, Lourdes Aguilar, Ignasi Esquerra, Sergio Oller, Asunción Moreno "Recent Work on the FESTCAT Database for Speech Synthesis", SLTECH-2009, 131-132

• Sílvia Gallego, "Corpus lingüístic pel desenvolupament d'una veu sintètica en català per a Festival", Final Degree Project, 2010 http://upcommons.upc.edu/pfc/handle/2099.1/9921

• Francesc Jarque, "Desenvolupament d'una veu en català per Festival", Final Degree Project 2007, http://gps-tsc.upc.es/veu/festcat/ext/UPC_Francesc_Jarque.pdf

Dictionaries

• Taulé, M., M.A. Martí, M. Recasens (2008) 'Ancora: Multilevel Annotated Corpora for Catalan and Spanish', Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Marrakesh (Morocco).

Terms and Conditions

For updated details on the copyright and license terms, please see the COPYRIGHT and LICENSE-*.txt files.

Thanks and funding notice

This work has been supported by the Catalan Government.

The project was promoted by several departments from the Catalan Government

• Departament d'Educació
• Secretaria de Telecomunicacions i Societat de la Informació del Departament de Presidència.

and from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)

• TALP Research Center
• Càtedra d'Accessibilitat
• Càtedra de Programari Lliure

Read the AUTHORS and THANKS files to see the list of people that have contributed to this project.