English

EE-TTS: Emphatic Expressive TTS with Linguistic Information

Sound 2025-05-27 v2 Computation and Language Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

While Current TTS systems perform well in synthesizing high-quality speech, producing highly expressive speech remains a challenge. Emphasis, as a critical factor in determining the expressiveness of speech, has attracted more attention nowadays. Previous works usually enhance the emphasis by adding intermediate features, but they can not guarantee the overall expressiveness of the speech. To resolve this matter, we propose Emphatic Expressive TTS (EE-TTS), which leverages multi-level linguistic information from syntax and semantics. EE-TTS contains an emphasis predictor that can identify appropriate emphasis positions from text and a conditioned acoustic model to synthesize expressive speech with emphasis and linguistic information. Experimental results indicate that EE-TTS outperforms baseline with MOS improvements of 0.49 and 0.67 in expressiveness and naturalness. EE-TTS also shows strong generalization across different datasets according to AB test results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.12107,
  title  = {EE-TTS: Emphatic Expressive TTS with Linguistic Information},
  author = {Yi Zhong and Chen Zhang and Xule Liu and Chenxi Sun and Weishan Deng and Haifeng Hu and Zhongqian Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.12107},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted by Interspeech 2023, fix some typos

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:39:54.095Z