Related papers: What Do Prosody and Text Convey? Characterizing Ho…

This paper presents a simple yet effective method to achieve prosody transfer from a reference speech signal to synthesized speech. The main idea is to incorporate well-known acoustic correlates of prosody such as pitch and loudness…

Infants face the difficult problem of segmenting continuous speech into words without the benefit of a fully developed lexicon. Several sources of information in speech might help infants solve this problem, including prosody, semantic…

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…

Computing practice today depends on visual output to drive almost all user interaction. Other senses, such as audition, may be totally neglected, or used tangentially, or used in highly restricted specialized ways. We have excellent audio…

In expressive speech synthesis it is widely adopted to use latent prosody representations to deal with variability of the data during training. Same text may correspond to various acoustic realizations, which is known as a one-to-many…

Intimacy is a fundamental aspect of how we relate to others in social settings. Language encodes the social information of intimacy through both topics and other more subtle cues (such as linguistic hedging and swearing). Here, we introduce…

We propose MoodNet - A Deep Convolutional Neural Network based architecture to effectively predict the emotion associated with a piece of music given its audio and lyrical content.We evaluate different architectures consisting of varying…

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…

Information theory is a practical and theoretical framework developed for the study of communication over noisy channels. Its probabilistic basis and capacity to relate statistical structure to function make it ideally suited for studying…

How much information is transmitted when animals use emotions to communicate? It is clear that emotions are used as communication systems in humans and other species. The quantitative theory of emotion information presented here is based on…

Prosody modeling is important, but still challenging in expressive voice conversion. As prosody is difficult to model, and other factors, e.g., speaker, environment and content, which are entangled with prosody in speech, should be removed…

From the eardrum to the auditory cortex, where acoustic stimuli are decoded, there are several stages of auditory processing and transmission where information may potentially get lost. In this paper, we aim at quantifying the information…

Prosodic cues in conversational speech aid listeners in discerning a message. We investigate whether acoustic cues in spoken dialogue can be used to identify the importance of individual words to the meaning of a conversation turn.…

Sarcasm is often expressed through several verbal and non-verbal cues, e.g., a change of tone, overemphasis in a word, a drawn-out syllable, or a straight looking face. Most of the recent work in sarcasm detection has been carried out on…

Textless speech-to-speech translation systems are rapidly advancing, thanks to the integration of self-supervised learning techniques. However, existing state-of-the-art systems fall short when it comes to capturing and transferring…

Centrality of emotion for the stories told by humans is underpinned by numerous studies in literature and psychology. The research in automatic storytelling has recently turned towards emotional storytelling, in which characters' emotions…

In speech communication, how something is said (paralinguistic information) is as crucial as what is said (linguistic information). As a type of paralinguistic information, English speech uses sentence stress, the heaviest prominence within…

Communication of information in complex systems can be considered as major driver of systems evolution. What matters is not the communicated information by itself but rather the meaning that is supplied to the information. However…

Biological neural systems encode and transmit information as patterns of activity tracing complex trajectories in high-dimensional state-spaces, inspiring alternative paradigms of information processing. Heteroclinic networks, naturally…

Expressive neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems incorporate a style encoder to learn a latent embedding as the style information. However, this embedding process may encode redundant textual information. This phenomenon is called content…