CoreaSpeech: Korean Speech Corpus via JAMO-based Coreset Selection for Efficient and Robust Korean Speech Generation
Ki-Joong Kwon, Junho So, Sang-Hoon Lee
While substantial advances have been achieved in TTS for languages such as English and Mandarin, Korean remains comparatively underrepresented due to the lack of rigorous preprocessing methods, systematically constructed datasets, a shortage of standardized Korean TTS benchmarks, and explicitly optimized models for Korean. To address these limitations, we propose a Korean-tailored data-refinement and coreset selection pipeline. It refines speech data and performs textual normalization especially for numerals and English terms, followed by a novel coreset selection strategy that leverages Jamo-based linguistic and phonological features unique to Korean. As a result, we release CoreaSpeech, an efficient and robust Korean speech corpus comprising 700 hours across 21,449 speakers. This refined core subset, evenly balanced across utterances ranging from 0 to 30 seconds, is derived from 2,058 hours of widely used Korean datasets. Building on this, we conducted extensive experiments via cross-lingual fine-tuning with our CoreaSpeech dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a new universal Korean TTS benchmark dataset including clean, noisy, and numeric subsets. Additionally, we demonstrate that our Korean-specific text normalization serves as a plug-and-play module, reliably improving performance regardless of the underlying TTS architecture. We publicly release our dataset, pipeline code, and evaluation benchmarks to support reproducible research and further advances in Korean and multilingual speech synthesis.