English

A unified front-end framework for English text-to-speech synthesis

Computation and Language 2024-03-27 v3 Artificial Intelligence Sound Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

The front-end is a critical component of English text-to-speech (TTS) systems, responsible for extracting linguistic features that are essential for a text-to-speech model to synthesize speech, such as prosodies and phonemes. The English TTS front-end typically consists of a text normalization (TN) module, a prosody word prosody phrase (PWPP) module, and a grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) module. However, current research on the English TTS front-end focuses solely on individual modules, neglecting the interdependence between them and resulting in sub-optimal performance for each module. Therefore, this paper proposes a unified front-end framework that captures the dependencies among the English TTS front-end modules. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in all modules.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.10666,
  title  = {A unified front-end framework for English text-to-speech synthesis},
  author = {Zelin Ying and Chen Li and Yu Dong and Qiuqiang Kong and Qiao Tian and Yuanyuan Huo and Yuxuan Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.10666},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted in ICASSP 2024