%Aigaion2 BibTeX export from Idiap Publications
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@TECHREPORT{Saheer_Idiap-RR-11-2012,
         author = {Saheer, Lakshmi and Yamagishi, Junichi and Garner, Philip N. and Dines, John},
       projects = {Idiap, EMIME},
          month = {4},
          title = {Combining Vocal Tract Length Normalization with Linear Transformations in a Bayesian Framework},
           type = {Idiap-RR},
         number = {Idiap-RR-11-2012},
           year = {2012},
    institution = {Idiap},
       abstract = {Recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness
of vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) as a rapid adaptation
technique for statistical parametric speech synthesis. VTLN
produces speech with naturalness preferable to that of MLLR-
based adaptation techniques, being much closer in quality to that
generated by the original average voice model. By contrast, with
just a single parameter, VTLN captures very few speaker specific
characteristics when compared to the available linear transform
based adaptation techniques. This paper proposes that the merits
of VTLN can be combined with those of linear transform based
adaptation technique in a Bayesian framework, where VTLN
is used as the prior information. A novel technique of propa-
gating the gender information from the VTLN prior through
constrained structural maximum a posteriori linear regression
(CSMAPLR) adaptation is presented. Experiments show that the
resulting transformation has improved speech quality with better
naturalness, intelligibility and improved speaker similarity.},
            pdf = {https://publications.idiap.ch/attachments/reports/2011/Saheer_Idiap-RR-11-2012.pdf}
}