PauseSpeech: Natural Speech Synthesis via Pre-trained Language Model and Pause-based Prosody Modeling

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 phrasing structure that groups words into phrases based on semantic information. In this paper, we propose PuaseSpeech, a speech synthesis system with a pre-trained language model and pause-based prosody modeling. First, we introduce a phrasing structure encoder that utilizes a context representation from the pre-trained language model. In the phrasing structure encoder, we extract a speaker-dependent syntactic representation from the context representation and then predict a pause sequence that separates the input text into phrases. Furthermore, we introduce a pause-based word encoder to model word-level prosody based on pause sequence. Experimental results show PauseSpeech outperforms previous models in terms of naturalness. Furthermore, in terms of objective evaluations, we can observe that our proposed methods help the model decrease the distance between ground-truth and synthesized speech. Audio samples are available at https://jisang93.github.io/pausespeech-demo/.