Related papers: PRODIS -- a speech database and a phoneme-based la…

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…

A large part of the expressive speech synthesis literature focuses on learning prosodic representations of the speech signal which are then modeled by a prior distribution during inference. In this paper, we compare different prior…

The Simon Fraser University Speech Error Database (SFUSED) is a public data collection developed for linguistic and psycholinguistic research. Here we demonstrate how its design and annotations can be used to test and evaluate speech…

Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…

Multilingual spoken dialogue systems have gained prominence in the recent past necessitating the requirement for a front-end Language Identification (LID) system. Most of the existing LID systems rely on modeling the language discriminative…

In noisy environments, speech can be hard to understand for humans. Spoken dialog systems can help to enhance the intelligibility of their output, either by modifying the speech synthesis (e.g., imitate Lombard speech) or by optimizing the…

Collecting high quality conversational data can be very expensive for most applications and infeasible for others due to privacy, ethical, or similar concerns. A promising direction to tackle this problem is to generate synthetic dialogues…

In text-to-speech synthesis, the ability to control voice characteristics is vital for various applications. By leveraging thriving text prompt-based generation techniques, it should be possible to enhance the nuanced control of voice…

The Paraphrase Database (PPDB; Ganitkevitch et al., 2013) is an extensive semantic resource, consisting of a list of phrase pairs with (heuristic) confidence estimates. However, it is still unclear how it can best be used, due to the…

Speech is considered as a multi-modal process where hearing and vision are two fundamentals pillars. In fact, several studies have demonstrated that the robustness of Automatic Speech Recognition systems can be improved when audio and…

The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of…

The prosody of a spoken word is determined by its surrounding context. In incremental text-to-speech synthesis, where the synthesizer produces an output before it has access to the complete input, the full context is often unknown which can…

Uncertainty plays a central role in spoken dialogue systems. Some stochastic models like Markov decision process (MDP) are used to model the dialogue manager. But the partially observable system state and user intention hinder the natural…

Despite rapid advancement in recent years, current speech enhancement models often produce speech that differs in perceptual quality from real clean speech. We propose a learning objective that formalizes differences in perceptual quality,…

Existing fake audio detection systems perform well in in-domain testing, but still face many challenges in out-of-domain testing. This is due to the mismatch between the training and test data, as well as the poor generalizability of…

Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) have rapidly expanded, supporting a wide range of tasks. These models are typically evaluated using text prompts, which may not reflect real-world scenarios where users interact with speech. To address…

We introduce an open source high-quality Mandarin TTS dataset MSceneSpeech (Multiple Scene Speech Dataset), which is intended to provide resources for expressive speech synthesis. MSceneSpeech comprises numerous audio recordings and texts…

This paper introduces PROTEUS, a fully automated system that produces data-driven hypotheses from raw data files. We apply PROTEUS to clinical proteogenomics, a field where effective downstream data analysis and hypothesis proposal is…

When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…

This paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody -- one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation -- can be characterized using information theory. We predict that languages that use prosody to make lexical…