Related papers: What Do Prosody and Text Convey? Characterizing Ho…
Prominences and boundaries are the essential constituents of prosodic structure in speech. They provide for means to chunk the speech stream into linguistically relevant units by providing them with relative saliences and demarcating them…
This dissertation proposes the study of multimodal learning in the context of musical signals. Throughout, we focus on the interaction between audio signals and text information. Among the many text sources related to music that can be used…
The differences in written text and conversational speech are substantial; previous parsers trained on treebanked text have given very poor results on spontaneous speech. For spoken language, the mismatch in style also extends to prosodic…
Prosody plays a vital role in verbal communication. Acoustic cues of prosody have been examined extensively. However, prosodic characteristics are not only perceived auditorily, but also visually based on head and facial movements. The…
Humans communicate using systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts -- from language and music to literature and science -- yet it remains unclear how, if at all, the structure of these networks supports the communication of information.…
Recent advances in text-to-speech have made it possible to generate natural-sounding audio from text. However, audiobook narrations involve dramatic vocalizations and intonations by the reader, with greater reliance on emotions, dialogues,…
Speech signals encode emotional, linguistic, and pathological information within a shared acoustic channel; however, disentanglement is typically assessed indirectly through downstream task performance. We introduce an information-theoretic…
Conversations emerge as the primary media for exchanging ideas and conceptions. From the listener's perspective, identifying various affective qualities, such as sarcasm, humour, and emotions, is paramount for comprehending the true…
We investigate correlations in information carriers, e.g. texts and pieces of music, which are represented by strings of letters. For information carrying strings generated by one source (i.e. a novel or a piece of music) we find…
Understanding and communicating data uncertainty is crucial for making informed decisions in sectors like finance and healthcare. Previous work has explored how to express uncertainty in various modes. For example, uncertainty can be…
The multimedia communications with texts and images are popular on social media. However, limited studies concern how images are structured with texts to form coherent meanings in human cognition. To fill in the gap, we present a novel…
Some recent models for Text-to-Speech synthesis aim to transfer the prosody of a reference utterance to the generated target synthetic speech. This is done by using a learned embedding of the reference utterance, which is used to condition…
In emotion recognition from speech, a key challenge lies in identifying speech signal segments that carry the most relevant acoustic variations for discerning specific emotions. Traditional approaches compute functionals for features such…
Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis faces the inherent challenge of producing multiple speech outputs with varying prosody given a single text input. While previous research has addressed this by predicting prosodic information from both text…
Speech is a multiplexed signal displaying levels of complexity, organizational principles and perceptual units of analysis at distinct timescales. This critical acoustic signal for human communication is thus characterized at distinct…
Counseling is carried out as spoken conversation between a therapist and a client. The empathy level expressed by the therapist is considered an important index of the quality of counseling and often assessed by an observer or the client.…
Recent advancements in neural end-to-end TTS models have shown high-quality, natural synthesized speech in a conventional sentence-based TTS. However, it is still challenging to reproduce similar high quality when a whole paragraph is…
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…
Language models have become nearly ubiquitous in natural language processing applications achieving state-of-the-art results in many tasks including prosody. As the model design does not define predetermined linguistic targets during…
Parsing spoken dialogue poses unique difficulties, including disfluencies and unmarked boundaries between sentence-like units. Previous work has shown that prosody can help with parsing disfluent speech (Tran et al. 2018), but has assumed…