Related papers: Probing the phonetic and phonological knowledge of…
In Standard Chinese, Tone 3 (the dipping tone) becomes Tone 2 (rising tone) when followed by another Tone 3. Previous studies have noted that this sandhi process may be incomplete, in the sense that the assimilated Tone 3 is still distinct…
Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems are able to generate audio that sounds almost as natural as human speech. However, the bar of developing high-quality TTS systems remains high since a sizable set of studio-quality <text, audio> pairs is…
Recent state-of-the-art neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis models have dramatically improved intelligibility and naturalness of generated speech from text. However, building a good bilingual or code-switched TTS for a particular voice is…
This study proposes a segmental-level prosodic probing framework to evaluate neural TTS models' ability to reproduce consonant-induced f0 perturbation, a fine-grained segmental-prosodic effect that reflects local articulatory mechanisms. We…
Neural sequence-to-sequence text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), such as Tacotron-2, transforms text into high-quality speech. However, generating speech with natural prosody still remains a challenge. Yasuda et. al. show that unlike natural…
In most cases, bilingual TTS needs to handle three types of input scripts: first language only, second language only, and second language embedded in the first language. In the latter two situations, the pronunciation and intonation of the…
The front-end module in a typical Mandarin text-to-speech system (TTS) is composed of a long pipeline of text processing components, which requires extensive efforts to build and is prone to large accumulative model size and cascade errors.…
Lip-to-speech (L2S) synthesis for Mandarin is a significant challenge, hindered by complex viseme-to-phoneme mappings and the critical role of lexical tones in intelligibility. To address this issue, we propose Lexical Tone-Aware…
In this paper, we present AISHELL-3, a large-scale and high-fidelity multi-speaker Mandarin speech corpus which could be used to train multi-speaker Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. The corpus contains roughly 85 hours of emotion-neutral…
A growing body of literature has demonstrated that semantics can co-determine fine phonetic detail. However, the complex interplay between phonetic realization and semantics remains understudied, particularly in pitch realization. The…
This study reports our efforts to improve automatic recognition of suprasegmentals by fine-tuning wav2vec 2.0 with CTC, a method that has been successful in automatic speech recognition. We demonstrate that the method can improve the…
Speech cloning technology is becoming more sophisticated thanks to the advances in machine learning. Researchers have successfully implemented natural-sounding English speech synthesis and good English speech cloning by some effective…
In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Mandarin tone classification method from continuous speech utterances utilizing both the spectrogram and the short-term context information as the input. Both spectrograms and context segment features…
In Mandarin, the tonal contours of monosyllabic words produced in isolation or in careful speech are characterized by four lexical tones: a high-level tone (T1), a rising tone (T2), a dipping tone (T3) and a falling tone (T4). However, in…
End-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems have been developed for European languages like English and Spanish with state-of-the-art speech quality, prosody, and naturalness. However, development of end-to-end TTS for Indian languages is…
While generative text-to-speech (TTS) models approach human-level quality, monolithic metrics fail to diagnose fine-grained acoustic artifacts or explain perceptual collapse. To address this, we propose TTS-PRISM, a multi-dimensional…
Modeling unit and model architecture are two key factors of Recurrent Neural Network Transducer (RNN-T) in end-to-end speech recognition. To improve the performance of RNN-T for Mandarin speech recognition task, a novel transformer…
Speech processing systems rely on robust feature extraction to handle phonetic and semantic variations found in natural language. While techniques exist for desensitizing features to common noise patterns produced by Speech-to-Text (STT)…
The pitch contours of Mandarin two-character words are generally understood as being shaped by the underlying tones of the constituent single-character words, in interaction with articulatory constraints imposed by factors such as speech…
Recent advancements in neural end-to-end TTS models have shown high-quality, natural synthesized speech in a conventional sentence-based TTS. However, it is still challenging to reproduce similar high quality when a whole paragraph is…