Related papers: Towards Modelling Coherence in Spoken Discourse

Automatic Speech Scoring (ASS) is the computer-assisted evaluation of a candidate's speaking proficiency in a language. ASS systems face many challenges like open grammar, variable pronunciations, and unstructured or semi-structured…

It is well-known that speakers who entrain to one another have more successful conversations than those who do not. Previous research has shown that interlocutors entrain on linguistic features in both written and spoken monolingual…

Modern text-to-speech synthesis pipelines typically involve multiple processing stages, each of which is designed or learnt independently from the rest. In this work, we take on the challenging task of learning to synthesise speech from…

Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…

The conventional paradigm in speech translation starts with a speech recognition step to generate transcripts, followed by a translation step with the automatic transcripts as input. To address various shortcomings of this paradigm, recent…

Speech is a natural interface for humans to interact with robots. Yet, aligning a robot's voice to its appearance is challenging due to the rich vocabulary of both modalities. Previous research has explored a few labels to describe robots…

Humans often speak in a continuous manner which leads to coherent and consistent prosody properties across neighboring utterances. However, most state-of-the-art speech synthesis systems only consider the information within each sentence…

We predict discourse segment boundaries from linguistic features of utterances, using a corpus of spoken narratives as data. We present two methods for developing segmentation algorithms from training data: hand tuning and machine learning.…

The ability to modulate vocal sounds and generate speech is one of the features which set humans apart from other living beings. The human voice can be characterized by several attributes such as pitch, timbre, loudness, and vocal tone. It…

Although coherence modeling has come a long way in developing novel models, their evaluation on downstream applications for which they are purportedly developed has largely been neglected. With the advancements made by neural approaches in…

Dialogue Act (DA) classification is the task of classifying utterances with respect to the function they serve in a dialogue. Existing approaches to DA classification model utterances without incorporating the turn changes among speakers…

Human speech exhibits rich and flexible prosodic variations. To address the one-to-many mapping problem from text to prosody in a reasonable and flexible manner, we propose DiffStyleTTS, a multi-speaker acoustic model based on a conditional…

Instruction-based speech processing is becoming popular. Studies show that training with multiple tasks boosts performance, but collecting diverse, large-scale tasks and datasets is expensive. Thus, it is highly desirable to design a…

Spoken dialogue systems allow humans to interact with machines using natural speech. As such, they have many benefits. By using speech as the primary communication medium, a computer interface can facilitate swift, human-like acquisition of…

As an indispensable part of modern human-computer interaction system, speech synthesis technology helps users get the output of intelligent machine more easily and intuitively, thus has attracted more and more attention. Due to the…

Human spoken language has long been the subject of scientific investigation, particularly with regard to the mechanisms underpinning speech production. Likewise, the study of animal communications has a substantial literature, with many…

The goal of this contribution is to use a parametric speech synthesis system for reducing background noise and other interferences from recorded speech signals. In a first step, Hidden Markov Models of the synthesis system are trained. Two…

With read-aloud speech synthesis achieving high naturalness scores, there is a growing research interest in synthesising spontaneous speech. However, human spontaneous face-to-face conversation has both spoken and non-verbal aspects (here,…

Recent advancements in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) modeling have led to significant strides in generating high-fidelity and diverse speech. However, dialogue generation, along with achieving human-like naturalness in speech, continues to…

Spoken language understanding system is traditionally designed as a pipeline of a number of components. First, the audio signal is processed by an automatic speech recognizer for transcription or n-best hypotheses. With the recognition…