1,972 research outputs found
Modeling of Speech Parameter Sequence Considering Global Variance for HMM-Based Speech Synthesis
Speech technologies such as speech recognition and speech synthesis have many potential applications since speech is the main way in which most people communicate. Various linguistic sounds are produced by controlling the configuration of oral cavities to convey a message in speech communication. The produced speech sounds temporally vary and ar
Parallel Reference Speaker Weighting for Kinematic-Independent Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion
Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion, the estimation of articulatory kinematics from an acoustic waveform, is a challenging but important problem. Accurate estimation of articulatory movements has the potential for significant impact on our understanding of speech production, on our capacity to assess and treat pathologies in a clinical setting, and on speech technologies such as computer aided pronunciation assessment and audio-video synthesis. However, because of the complex and speaker-specific relationship between articulation and acoustics, existing approaches for inversion do not generalize well across speakers. As acquiring speaker-specific kinematic data for training is not feasible in many practical applications, this remains an important and open problem. This paper proposes a novel approach to acoustic-to-articulatory inversion, Parallel Reference Speaker Weighting (PRSW), which requires no kinematic data for the target speaker and a small amount of acoustic adaptation data. PRSW hypothesizes that acoustic and kinematic similarities are correlated and uses speaker-adapted articulatory models derived from acoustically derived weights. The system was assessed using a 20-speaker data set of synchronous acoustic and Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) kinematic data. Results demonstrate that by restricting the reference group to a subset consisting of speakers with strong individual speaker-dependent inversion performance, the PRSW method is able to attain kinematic-independent acoustic-to-articulatory inversion performance nearly matching that of the speaker-dependent model, with an average correlation of 0.62 versus 0.63. This indicates that given a sufficiently complete and appropriately selected reference speaker set for adaptation, it is possible to create effective articulatory models without kinematic training data
Recent development of the HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS)
A statistical parametric approach to speech synthesis based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) has grown in popularity over the last few years. In this approach, spectrum, excitation, and duration of speech are simultaneously modeled by context-dependent HMMs, and speech waveforms are generate from the HMMs themselves. Since December 2002, we have publicly released an open-source software toolkit named “HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS)” to provide a research and development toolkit for statistical parametric speech synthesis. This paper describes recent developments of HTS in detail, as well as future release plans
Sampling-based speech parameter generation using moment-matching networks
This paper presents sampling-based speech parameter generation using
moment-matching networks for Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based speech synthesis.
Although people never produce exactly the same speech even if we try to express
the same linguistic and para-linguistic information, typical statistical speech
synthesis produces completely the same speech, i.e., there is no
inter-utterance variation in synthetic speech. To give synthetic speech natural
inter-utterance variation, this paper builds DNN acoustic models that make it
possible to randomly sample speech parameters. The DNNs are trained so that
they make the moments of generated speech parameters close to those of natural
speech parameters. Since the variation of speech parameters is compressed into
a low-dimensional simple prior noise vector, our algorithm has lower
computation cost than direct sampling of speech parameters. As the first step
towards generating synthetic speech that has natural inter-utterance variation,
this paper investigates whether or not the proposed sampling-based generation
deteriorates synthetic speech quality. In evaluation, we compare speech quality
of conventional maximum likelihood-based generation and proposed sampling-based
generation. The result demonstrates the proposed generation causes no
degradation in speech quality.Comment: Submitted to INTERSPEECH 201
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