Related papers: Improving TTS for Shanghainese: Addressing Tone Sa…
Current end-to-end code-switching Text-to-Speech (TTS) can already generate high quality two languages speech in the same utterance with single speaker bilingual corpora. When the speakers of the bilingual corpora are different, the…
Representing speech as discretized units has numerous benefits in supporting downstream spoken language processing tasks. However, the approach has been less explored in speech synthesis of tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese. Our…
Chinese dialects are different variations of Chinese and can be considered as different languages in the same language family with Mandarin. Though they all use Chinese characters, the pronunciations, grammar and idioms can vary…
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 is essential for speech technology, shaping comprehension, naturalness, and expressiveness. However, current text-to-speech (TTS) systems still struggle to accurately capture human-like prosodic variation, in part because existing…
In expressive and controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS), explicit prosodic features significantly improve the naturalness and controllability of synthesised speech. However, manual prosody annotation is labor-intensive and inconsistent. To…
Modern sequence to sequence neural TTS systems provide close to natural speech quality. Such systems usually comprise a network converting linguistic/phonetic features sequence to an acoustic features sequence, cascaded with a neural…
Discrete speech units (DSUs) are derived by quantising representations from models trained using self-supervised learning (SSL). They are a popular representation for a wide variety of spoken language tasks, including those where prosody…
In Standard Chinese, Tone 3 (the dipping tone) becomes Tone 2 (rising tone) when followed by another Tone 3. Previous studies have noted that this sandhi process may be incomplete, in the sense that the assimilated Tone 3 is still distinct…
This paper presents an accented text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis framework with limited training data. We study two aspects concerning accent rendering: phonetic (phoneme difference) and prosodic (pitch pattern and phoneme duration)…
We report our NTU-AISG Text-to-speech (TTS) entry systems for the Blizzard Challenge 2020 in this paper. There are two TTS tasks in this year's challenge, one is a Mandarin TTS task, the other is a Shanghai dialect TTS task. We have…
This study reports our efforts to improve automatic recognition of suprasegmentals by fine-tuning wav2vec 2.0 with CTC, a method that has been successful in automatic speech recognition. We demonstrate that the method can improve the…
The availability of prosodic information from speech signals is useful in a wide range of applications. However, deriving this information from speech signals can be a laborious task involving manual intervention. Therefore, the current…
Tone is a prosodic feature used to distinguish words in many languages, some of which are endangered and scarcely documented. In this work, we use unsupervised representation learning to identify probable clusters of syllables that share…
Text-to-Speech (TTS) has recently seen great progress in synthesizing high-quality speech owing to the rapid development of parallel TTS systems, but producing speech with naturalistic prosodic variations, speaking styles and emotional…
The present contribution is a tutorial on selected aspects of prosody, the rhythms and melodies of speech, based on a course of the same name at the Summer School on Contemporary Phonetics and Phonology at Tongji University, Shanghai, China…
Accented text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis seeks to generate speech with an accent (L2) as a variant of the standard version (L1). Accented TTS synthesis is challenging as L2 is different from L1 in both in terms of phonetic rendering and…
Recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) have improved quality and naturalness to near-human capabilities when considering isolated sentences. But something which is still lacking in order to achieve human-like communication is the dynamic…
Current state-of-the-art methods for automatic synthetic speech evaluation are based on MOS prediction neural models. Such MOS prediction models include MOSNet and LDNet that use spectral features as input, and SSL-MOS that relies on a…
Prosody modeling is an essential component in modern text-to-speech (TTS) frameworks. By explicitly providing prosody features to the TTS model, the style of synthesized utterances can thus be controlled. However, predicting natural and…