Related papers: Prosodic features improve sentence segmentation an…

Previous works have demonstrated the effectiveness of utilising pre-trained sentence encoders based on their sentence representations for meaning comparison tasks. Though such representations are shown to capture hidden syntax structures,…

The prosody of a spoken utterance, including features like stress, intonation and rhythm, can significantly affect the underlying semantics, and as a consequence can also affect its textual translation. Nevertheless, prosody is rarely…

Prosody transfer is well-studied in the context of expressive speech synthesis. Cross-lingual prosody transfer, however, is challenging and has been under-explored to date. In this paper, we present a novel solution to learn prosody…

We describe a number of experiments that demonstrate the usefulness of prosodic information for a processing module which parses spoken utterances with a feature-based grammar employing empty categories. We show that by requiring certain…

Speech language models refer to language models with speech processing and understanding capabilities. One key desirable capability for speech language models is the ability to capture the intricate interdependency between content and…

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…

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…

The prosodic aspects of speech signals produced by current text-to-speech systems are typically averaged over training material, and as such lack the variety and liveliness found in natural speech. To avoid monotony and averaged prosody…

We address the problem of inferring a speaker's level of certainty based on prosodic information in the speech signal, which has application in speech-based dialogue systems. We show that using phrase-level prosodic features centered around…

Generating expressive speech with rich and varied prosody continues to be a challenge for Text-to-Speech. Most efforts have focused on sophisticated neural architectures intended to better model the data distribution. Yet, in evaluations it…

Despite prosody is related to the linguistic information up to the discourse structure, most text-to-speech (TTS) systems only take into account that within each sentence, which makes it challenging when converting a paragraph of texts into…

Prosody describes both form and function of a sentence using the suprasegmental features of speech. Prosody phenomena are explored in the domain of higher phonological constituents such as word, phonological phrase and intonational phrase.…

Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…

A new language model for speech recognition inspired by linguistic analysis is presented. The model develops hidden hierarchical structure incrementally and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history - thus enabling the…

Turn-taking is a fundamental aspect of human communication and can be described as the ability to take turns, project upcoming turn shifts, and supply backchannels at appropriate locations throughout a conversation. In this work, we…

Prosodic boundary plays an important role in text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) in terms of naturalness and readability. However, the acquisition of prosodic boundary labels relies on manual annotation, which is costly and time-consuming. In…

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…

Previous research on word embeddings has shown that sparse representations, which can be either learned on top of existing dense embeddings or obtained through model constraints during training time, have the benefit of increased…

Designing machine intelligence to converse with a human user necessarily requires an understanding of how humans participate in conversation, and thus conversation modeling is an important task in natural language processing. New…

Previous attempts at RST-style discourse segmentation typically adopt features centered on a single token to predict whether to insert a boundary before that token. In contrast, we develop a discourse segmenter utilizing a set of pairing…