Related papers: Expressivity in TTS from Semantics and Pragmatics
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…
Text-to-speech is now able to achieve near-human naturalness and research focus has shifted to increasing expressivity. One popular method is to transfer the prosody from a reference speech sample. There have been considerable advances in…
The Spoken Language Translator is a prototype for practically useful systems capable of translating continuous spoken language within restricted domains. The prototype system translates air travel (ATIS) queries from spoken English to…
Punctuation and Segmentation are key to readability in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), often evaluated using F1 scores that require high-quality human transcripts and do not reflect readability well. Human evaluation is expensive,…
This paper describes ESPnet2-TTS, an end-to-end text-to-speech (E2E-TTS) toolkit. ESPnet2-TTS extends our earlier version, ESPnet-TTS, by adding many new features, including: on-the-fly flexible pre-processing, joint training with neural…
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A typical text-to-speech system converts a language text into a waveform. There exist many English TTS systems that produce mature, natural, and human-like speech synthesizers.…
Building text-to-speech (TTS) synthesisers for Indian languages is a difficult task owing to a large number of active languages. Indian languages can be classified into a finite set of families, prominent among them, Indo-Aryan and…
Text summarization (TS) is a natural language processing (NLP) subtask pertaining to the automatic formulation of a concise and coherent summary that covers the major concepts and topics from one or multiple documents. Recent advancements…
Recent advancements in Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology have led to natural-sounding speech for English, primarily due to the availability of large-scale, high-quality web data. However, many other languages lack access to such resources,…
We argue that grammatical processing is a viable alternative to concept spotting for processing spoken input in a practical dialogue system. We discuss the structure of the grammar, the properties of the parser, and a method for achieving…
This paper proposes a speech synthesis system that allows users to specify and control the acoustic characteristics of a speaker by means of prompts describing the speaker's traits of synthesized speech. Unlike previous approaches, our…
We present a multi-speaker Japanese audiobook text-to-speech (TTS) system that leverages multimodal context information of preceding acoustic context and bilateral textual context to improve the prosody of synthetic speech. Previous work…
We present a new neural text to speech (TTS) method that is able to transform text to speech in voices that are sampled in the wild. Unlike other systems, our solution is able to deal with unconstrained voice samples and without requiring…
Automatic detection of prominence at the word and syllable-levels is critical for building computer-assisted language learning systems. It has been shown that prosody embeddings learned by the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-speech…
This paper introduces DiFlow-TTS, a novel zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) system that employs discrete flow matching for generative speech modeling. We position this work as an entry point that may facilitate further advances in this…
Conventional text-to-speech (TTS) research has predominantly focused on enhancing the quality of synthesized speech for speakers in the training dataset. The challenge of synthesizing lifelike speech for unseen, out-of-dataset speakers,…
Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) distinguishes itself from other semantic representation frameworks by its ability to model complex semantic and discourse phenomena through structural nesting and variable binding. While seq2seq models…
We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer's recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence.…
End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of…
Cross-speaker style transfer (CSST) in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis aims at transferring a speaking style to the synthesised speech in a target speaker's voice. Most previous CSST approaches rely on expensive high-quality data carrying…