TUNDRA: a multilingual corpus of found data for TTS research created with light supervision

Simple4All Tundra (version 1.0) is the first release of a standardised multilingual corpus designed for text-to-speech re-search with imperfect or found data. The corpus consists of approximately 60 hours of speech data from audiobooks in 14 languages, as well as utterance-level alignments obtained with a lightly-supervised process. Future versions of the corpus will include finer-grained alignment and prosodic annotation, all of which will be made freely available. This paper gives a gen-eral outline of the data collected so far, as well as a detailed description of how this has been done, emphasizing the mini-mal language-specific knowledge and manual intervention used to compile the corpus. To demonstrate its potential use, text-to-speech systems have been built for all languages using unsu-pervised or lightly supervised methods, also briefly presented in the paper. Index Terms: multilingual corpus, light supervision, imperfect data, found data, text-to-speech, audiobook data