Related papers: Improving Prosody Modelling with Cross-Utterance B…

This paper presents an end-to-end high-quality singing voice synthesis (SVS) system that uses bidirectional encoder representation from Transformers (BERT) derived semantic embeddings to improve the expressiveness of the synthesized singing…

The Lombard effect plays a key role in natural communication, particularly in noisy environments or when addressing hearing-impaired listeners. We present a controllable text-to-speech (TTS) system capable of synthesizing Lombard speech for…

We present a novel conversational-context aware end-to-end speech recognizer based on a gated neural network that incorporates conversational-context/word/speech embeddings. Unlike conventional speech recognition models, our model learns…

Cross-lingual word sense disambiguation (WSD) tackles the challenge of disambiguating ambiguous words across languages given context. The pre-trained BERT embedding model has been proven to be effective in extracting contextual information…

Although text-to-speech (TTS) systems have significantly improved, most TTS systems still have limitations in synthesizing speech with appropriate phrasing. For natural speech synthesis, it is important to synthesize the speech with a…

Current text to speech (TTS) systems usually leverage a cascaded acoustic model and vocoder pipeline with mel-spectrograms as the intermediate representations, which suffer from two limitations: 1) the acoustic model and vocoder are…

This paper presents a simple yet effective method to achieve prosody transfer from a reference speech signal to synthesized speech. The main idea is to incorporate well-known acoustic correlates of prosody such as pitch and loudness…

Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis faces the inherent challenge of producing multiple speech outputs with varying prosody given a single text input. While previous research has addressed this by predicting prosodic information from both text…

Cross-speaker style transfer is crucial to the applications of multi-style and expressive speech synthesis at scale. It does not require the target speakers to be experts in expressing all styles and to collect corresponding recordings for…

We propose a novel training strategy for Tacotron-based text-to-speech (TTS) system to improve the expressiveness of speech. One of the key challenges in prosody modeling is the lack of reference that makes explicit modeling difficult. The…

Prosody contains rich information beyond the literal meaning of words, which is crucial for the intelligibility of speech. Current models still fall short in phrasing and intonation; they not only miss or misplace breaks when synthesizing…

Cross-speaker style transfer in speech synthesis aims at transferring a style from source speaker to synthesized speech of a target speaker's timbre. In most previous methods, the synthesized fine-grained prosody features often represent…

This paper proposes a new "decompose-and-edit" paradigm for the text-based speech insertion task that facilitates arbitrary-length speech insertion and even full sentence generation. In the proposed paradigm, global and local factors in…

We present BERT-CTC-Transducer (BECTRA), a novel end-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E-ASR) model formulated by the transducer with a BERT-enhanced encoder. Integrating a large-scale pre-trained language model (LM) into E2E-ASR has…

Although end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) models such as Tacotron have shown excellent results, they typically require a sizable set of high-quality <text, audio> pairs for training, which are expensive to collect. In this paper, we propose…

We often verbally express emotions in a multifaceted manner, they may vary in their intensities and may be expressed not just as a single but as a mixture of emotions. This wide spectrum of emotions is well-studied in the structural model…

This paper presents BERT-CTC, a novel formulation of end-to-end speech recognition that adapts BERT for connectionist temporal classification (CTC). Our formulation relaxes the conditional independence assumptions used in conventional CTC…

Phrase representations derived from BERT often do not exhibit complex phrasal compositionality, as the model relies instead on lexical similarity to determine semantic relatedness. In this paper, we propose a contrastive fine-tuning…

Spoken language understanding is typically based on pipeline architectures including speech recognition and natural language understanding steps. These components are optimized independently to allow usage of available data, but the overall…

Recent advances in deep learning methods have elevated synthetic speech quality to human level, and the field is now moving towards addressing prosodic variation in synthetic speech.Despite successes in this effort, the state-of-the-art…