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Reference-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) models can generate multiple, prosodically-different renditions of the same target text. Such models jointly learn a latent acoustic space during training, which can be sampled from during inference.…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have produced substantial improvements in discourse-aware neural machine translation (NMT), for example, improved coherence in spoken language translation. However, the underlying reasons for their strong…

Although text-to-speech (TTS) systems have significantly improved, most TTS systems still have limitations in synthesizing speech with appropriate phrasing. For natural speech synthesis, it is important to synthesize the speech with a…

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) with impressive performance across various text-based tasks. However, the extension of text-dominant LLMs to with speech generation tasks remains…

The meanings of words and phrases depend not only on where they are used (contexts) but also on who use them (writers). Pretrained language models (PLMs) are powerful tools for capturing context, but they are typically pretrained and…

Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) have shown that language model (LM)-based systems offer competitive performance to their counterparts. Further optimization can be achieved through preference alignment algorithms, which adjust…

Pause insertion, also known as phrase break prediction and phrasing, is an essential part of TTS systems because proper pauses with natural duration significantly enhance the rhythm and intelligibility of synthetic speech. However,…

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…

Are end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) models over-parametrized? To what extent can these models be pruned, and what happens to their synthesis capabilities? This work serves as a starting point to explore pruning both spectrogram prediction…

The emergence of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has shown great success in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including text classification. Due to the minimal to no feature engineering required when using these models, PLMs…

Language modeling studies the probability distributions over strings of texts. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). It has been widely used in text generation, speech recognition, machine…

The wide applicability of pretrained transformer models (PTMs) for natural language tasks is well demonstrated, but their ability to comprehend short phrases of text is less explored. To this end, we evaluate different PTMs from the lens of…

This work introduces approaches to assessing phrase breaks in ESL learners' speech using pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs). There are two tasks: overall assessment of phrase break for a speech clip and…

Recently, the emergence of pre-trained models (PTMs) has brought natural language processing (NLP) to a new era. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of PTMs for NLP. We first briefly introduce language representation learning…

Large Language Model (LLM) based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling large speech datasets and generating natural speech for new speakers. However, LLM-based TTS models are not robust as the…

Expressive text-to-speech (TTS) has become a hot research topic recently, mainly focusing on modeling prosody in speech. Prosody modeling has several challenges: 1) the extracted pitch used in previous prosody modeling works have inevitable…

Speech pre-training has primarily demonstrated efficacy on classification tasks, while its capability of generating novel speech, similar to how GPT-2 can generate coherent paragraphs, has barely been explored. Generative Spoken Language…

Text embeddings have attracted growing interest due to their effectiveness across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including retrieval, classification, clustering, bitext mining, and summarization. With the emergence…

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are being quickly adapted to many domains, including healthcare, their strengths and pitfalls remain under-explored. In our study, we examine the effects of prompt engineering to guide Large Language…

Neural text-to-speech systems are often optimized on L1/L2 losses, which make strong assumptions about the distributions of the target data space. Aiming to improve those assumptions, Normalizing Flows and Diffusion Probabilistic Models…