Phonetic Completeness Over Prosodic Diversity: Syllable-Level Synthetic Corpus Construction for Low-Resource Penang Hokkien Speech Synthesis

Abstract: This study presents the first Text-to-Speech (TTS) model for Penang Hokkien, a low-resource tonal dialect at risk of extinction. To address phonological sparsity in the collected speech corpus, we propose a two-stage fine-tuning approach that emphasizes comprehensive phonetic coverage through syllable-level synthetic augmentation while subsequently refining prosodic naturalness using real speech recordings. By supplementing a limited 45-minute real speech corpus with a 2-hour syllable-level concatenative synthetic corpus, the full dialectal inventory of approximately 2,000 unique syllable-tone combinations was encompassed. Experimental results suggest that improving syllable-tone coverage contributes substantially to intelligibility and tonal accuracy in this low-resource tonal setting. Technical optimizations, including a 600-ms cross-fading technique to mitigate boundary artifacts and numerical tone markers to reduce token sparsity, further improved model stability and synthesis quality. The final model achieved a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 3.92.

Yu Liang Lai, Yen Min Jasmina Khaw, Seng Poh Lim and Tien Ping Tan. “Phonetic Completeness Over Prosodic Diversity: Syllable-Level Synthetic Corpus Construction for Low-Resource Penang Hokkien Speech Synthesis”. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA) 17.5 (2026). http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170563

@article{Lai2026,
title = {Phonetic Completeness Over Prosodic Diversity: Syllable-Level Synthetic Corpus Construction for Low-Resource Penang Hokkien Speech Synthesis},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170563},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170563},
year = {2026},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {17},
number = {5},
author = {Yu Liang Lai and Yen Min Jasmina Khaw and Seng Poh Lim and Tien Ping Tan}
}