Related papers: A Computational Memory and Processing Model for Pr…

Prosody -- the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo -- carries critical aspects of meaning. However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly…

Text-To-Speech (TTS) prosody transfer models can generate varied prosodic renditions, for the same text, by conditioning on a reference utterance. These models are trained with a reference that is identical to the target utterance. But when…

Recent neural speech synthesis systems have gradually focused on the control of prosody to improve the quality of synthesized speech, but they rarely consider the variability of prosody and the correlation between prosody and semantics…

In the existing cross-speaker style transfer task, a source speaker with multi-style recordings is necessary to provide the style for a target speaker. However, it is hard for one speaker to express all expected styles. In this paper, a…

Prosody contains rich information beyond the literal meaning of words, which is crucial for the intelligibility of speech. Current models still fall short in phrasing and intonation; they not only miss or misplace breaks when synthesizing…

Text does not fully specify the spoken form, so text-to-speech models must be able to learn from speech data that vary in ways not explained by the corresponding text. One way to reduce the amount of unexplained variation in training data…

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…

Modern neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis can generate speech that is indistinguishable from natural speech. However, the prosody of generated utterances often represents the average prosodic style of the database instead of having wide…

A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction, topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically present for…

Prompts have been shown to be an effective method to adapt a frozen Pretrained Language Model (PLM) to perform well on downstream tasks. Prompts can be represented by a human-engineered word sequence or by a learned continuous embedding. In…

While there has been significant progress towards modelling coherence in written discourse, the work in modelling spoken discourse coherence has been quite limited. Unlike the coherence in text, coherence in spoken discourse is also…

State-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems have utilized pretrained language models (PLMs) to enhance prosody and create more natural-sounding speech. However, while PLMs have been extensively researched for natural language…

Some recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility of single-stage neural text-to-speech, which does not need to generate mel-spectrograms but generates the raw waveforms directly from the text. Single-stage text-to-speech often faces…

Prosody Transfer (PT) is a technique that aims to use the prosody from a source audio as a reference while synthesising speech. Fine-grained PT aims at capturing prosodic aspects like rhythm, emphasis, melody, duration, and loudness, from a…

Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…

In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry…

Improving text representation has attracted much attention to achieve expressive text-to-speech (TTS). However, existing works only implicitly learn the prosody with masked token reconstruction tasks, which leads to low training efficiency…

Voice conversion as the style transfer task applied to speech, refers to converting one person's speech into a new speech that sounds like another person's. Up to now, there has been a lot of research devoted to better implementation of VC…

Expressive text-to-speech systems have undergone significant advancements owing to prosody modeling, but conventional methods can still be improved. Traditional approaches have relied on the autoregressive method to predict the quantized…

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…