Why CART?

[Jonas R]

What is the justification for using CART as opposed to another machine learning model when it comes to prosody prediction? Has there been much research showing that it is the most efficient?

[Simon]

An astute question!

A pragmatic reason that CARTs are used extensively in Festival is because the toolkit behind Festival (called “Edinburgh Speech Tools”) has a CART-building program (called “Wagon”).

There are of course many alternative, and sometimes better, forms of machine learning, such as Neural Networks. If Festival was re-written today, it would not use CARTs quite so extensively.

In the Speech Processing course, you should see prosody prediction using CARTs mainly as an example of how CARTs can be applied to both classification and regression problems. Don’t see it as representing the state-of-the-art in prosody prediction for TTS.

[Author]

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