Related papers: Neural Lexicon Reader: Reduce Pronunciation Errors…

This work focuses on modelling a speaker's accent that does not have a dedicated text-to-speech (TTS) frontend, including a grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) module. Prior work on modelling accents assumes a phonetic transcription is available for…

Breakthroughs in deep learning and memory networks have made major advances in natural language understanding. Language is sequential and information carried through the sequence can be captured through memory networks. Learning the…

Neural text-to-speech (TTS) generally consists of cascaded architecture with separately optimized acoustic model and vocoder, or end-to-end architecture with continuous mel-spectrograms or self-extracted speech frames as the intermediate…

Autoregressive (AR) Transformer-based sequence models are known to have difficulty generalizing to sequences longer than those seen during training. When applied to text-to-speech (TTS), these models tend to drop or repeat words or produce…

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…

Expressive text-to-speech (TTS) aims to synthesize different speaking style speech according to human's demands. Nowadays, there are two common ways to control speaking styles: (1) Pre-defining a group of speaking style and using…

Recently, there has been growing interest in multi-speaker speech recognition, where the utterances of multiple speakers are recognized from their mixture. Promising techniques have been proposed for this task, but earlier works have…

Speech-to-text alignment is a critical component of neural textto-speech (TTS) models. Autoregressive TTS models typically use an attention mechanism to learn these alignments on-line. However, these alignments tend to be brittle and often…

An end-to-end (e2e) text-to-speech (TTS) system is a deep architecture that learns to associate a text string with acoustic speech patterns from a curated dataset. It is expected that all aspects associated with speech production, such as…

Existing curriculum learning approaches to Neural Machine Translation (NMT) require sampling sufficient amounts of "easy" samples from training data at the early training stage. This is not always achievable for low-resource languages where…

Accent plays a crucial role in speaker identity and inclusivity in speech technologies. Existing accented text-to-speech (TTS) systems either require large-scale accented datasets or lack fine-grained phoneme-level controllability. We…

There has been limited evaluation of advanced Text-to-Speech (TTS) models with Mathematical eXpressions (MX) as inputs. In this work, we design experiments to evaluate quality and intelligibility of five TTS models through listening and…

Developing Text Normalization (TN) systems for Text-to-Speech (TTS) on new languages is hard. We propose a novel architecture to facilitate it for multiple languages while using data less than 3% of the size of the data used by the state of…

In modern speech synthesis, paralinguistic information--such as a speaker's vocal timbre, emotional state, and dynamic prosody--plays a critical role in conveying nuance beyond mere semantics. Traditional Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems rely…

Recently, it has become easier to obtain speech data from various media such as the internet or YouTube, but directly utilizing them to train a neural text-to-speech (TTS) model is difficult. The proportion of clean speech is insufficient…

Neural sequence-to-sequence TTS has achieved significantly better output quality than statistical speech synthesis using HMMs. However, neural TTS is generally not probabilistic and uses non-monotonic attention. Attention failures increase…

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…

Whereas conventional spoken language understanding (SLU) systems map speech to text, and then text to intent, end-to-end SLU systems map speech directly to intent through a single trainable model. Achieving high accuracy with these…

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are gaining popularity over cascaded approaches due to their simplicity and ability to avoid error propagation. However, these systems model sequence labeling as a sequence prediction…

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in…