Related papers: Using previous acoustic context to improve Text-to…

End-to-end neural TTS has achieved superior performance on reading style speech synthesis. However, it's still a challenge to build a high-quality conversational TTS due to the limitations of the corpus and modeling capability. This study…

We study the problem of leveraging the syntactic structure of text to enhance pre-trained models such as BERT and RoBERTa. Existing methods utilize syntax of text either in the pre-training stage or in the fine-tuning stage, so that they…

Prosodic modeling is a core problem in speech synthesis. The key challenge is producing desirable prosody from textual input containing only phonetic information. In this preliminary study, we introduce the concept of "style tokens" in…

Current ASR systems are mainly trained and evaluated at the utterance level. Long range cross utterance context can be incorporated. A key task is to derive a suitable compact representation of the most relevant history contexts. In…

Video-to-speech synthesis is the task of reconstructing the speech signal from a silent video of a speaker. Most established approaches to date involve a two-step process, whereby an intermediate representation from the video, such as a…

Generating expressive and contextually appropriate prosody remains a challenge for modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems. This is particularly evident for long, multi-sentence inputs. In this paper, we examine simple extensions to a…

This paper proposes Transducers with Pronunciation-aware Embeddings (PET). Unlike conventional Transducers where the decoder embeddings for different tokens are trained independently, the PET model's decoder embedding incorporates shared…

The use of conversational assistants to search for information is becoming increasingly more popular among the general public, pushing the research towards more advanced and sophisticated techniques. In the last few years, in particular,…

Position embeddings, encoding the positional relationships among tokens in text sequences, make great contributions to modeling local context features in Transformer-based pre-trained language models. However, in Extractive Question…

While most conversational AI systems focus on textual dialogue only, conditioning utterances on visual context (when it's available) can lead to more realistic conversations. Unfortunately, a major challenge for incorporating visual context…

The amount of articulatory data available for training deep learning models is much less compared to acoustic speech data. In order to improve articulatory-to-acoustic synthesis performance in these low-resource settings, we propose a…

We introduce second-order vector representations of words, induced from nearest neighborhood topological features in pre-trained contextual word embeddings. We then analyze the effects of using second-order embeddings as input features in…

This paper advances phrase break prediction (also known as phrasing) in multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) systems. We integrate speaker-specific features by leveraging speaker embeddings to enhance the performance of the phrasing model. We…

Recent advances in synthetic speech quality have enabled us to train text-to-speech (TTS) systems by using synthetic corpora. However, merely increasing the amount of synthetic data is not always advantageous for improving training…

We present a novel neural encoder system for acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. We leverage the Pink Trombone voice synthesizer that reveals articulatory parameters (e.g tongue position and vocal cord configuration). Our system is designed…

Previous works on expressive speech synthesis mainly focus on current sentence. The context in adjacent sentences is neglected, resulting in inflexible speaking style for the same text, which lacks speech variations. In this paper, we…

This paper presents a novel framework to build a voice conversion (VC) system by learning from a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system, that is called TTS-VC transfer learning. We first develop a multi-speaker speech synthesis system with…

Text does not fully specify the spoken form, so text-to-speech models must be able to learn from speech data that vary in ways not explained by the corresponding text. One way to reduce the amount of unexplained variation in training data…

While state-of-the-art Text-to-Speech systems can generate natural speech of very high quality at sentence level, they still meet great challenges in speech generation for paragraph / long-form reading. Such deficiencies are due to i)…

In expressive speech synthesis it is widely adopted to use latent prosody representations to deal with variability of the data during training. Same text may correspond to various acoustic realizations, which is known as a one-to-many…