Phonetic alignment for speech synthesis in under-resourced languages

The rapid development of concatenative speech synthesis systems in resource scarce languages requires an efficient and accurate solution with regard to automated phonetic alignment. However, in this context corpora are often minimally designed due to a lack of resources and expertise necessary for large scale development. Under these circumstances many techniques toward accurate segmentation are not feasible and it is unclear which approaches should be followed. In this paper we investigate this problem by evaluating alignment approaches and demonstrating how these approaches can be applied to limit manual interaction while achieving acceptable alignment accuracy with minimal ideal resources.