2,178 research outputs found
Towards Joint Modeling of Dialogue Response and Speech Synthesis based on Large Language Model
This paper explores the potential of constructing an AI spoken dialogue
system that "thinks how to respond" and "thinks how to speak" simultaneously,
which more closely aligns with the human speech production process compared to
the current cascade pipeline of independent chatbot and Text-to-Speech (TTS)
modules. We hypothesize that Large Language Models (LLMs) with billions of
parameters possess significant speech understanding capabilities and can
jointly model dialogue responses and linguistic features. We conduct two sets
of experiments: 1) Prosodic structure prediction, a typical front-end task in
TTS, demonstrating the speech understanding ability of LLMs, and 2) Further
integrating dialogue response and a wide array of linguistic features using a
unified encoding format. Our results indicate that the LLM-based approach is a
promising direction for building unified spoken dialogue systems
Dict-TTS: Learning to Pronounce with Prior Dictionary Knowledge for Text-to-Speech
Polyphone disambiguation aims to capture accurate pronunciation knowledge
from natural text sequences for reliable Text-to-speech (TTS) systems. However,
previous approaches require substantial annotated training data and additional
efforts from language experts, making it difficult to extend high-quality
neural TTS systems to out-of-domain daily conversations and countless languages
worldwide. This paper tackles the polyphone disambiguation problem from a
concise and novel perspective: we propose Dict-TTS, a semantic-aware generative
text-to-speech model with an online website dictionary (the existing prior
information in the natural language). Specifically, we design a
semantics-to-pronunciation attention (S2PA) module to match the semantic
patterns between the input text sequence and the prior semantics in the
dictionary and obtain the corresponding pronunciations; The S2PA module can be
easily trained with the end-to-end TTS model without any annotated phoneme
labels. Experimental results in three languages show that our model outperforms
several strong baseline models in terms of pronunciation accuracy and improves
the prosody modeling of TTS systems. Further extensive analyses demonstrate
that each design in Dict-TTS is effective. The code is available at
\url{https://github.com/Zain-Jiang/Dict-TTS}.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202
Forward Attention in Sequence-to-sequence Acoustic Modelling for Speech Synthesis
This paper proposes a forward attention method for the sequenceto- sequence
acoustic modeling of speech synthesis. This method is motivated by the nature
of the monotonic alignment from phone sequences to acoustic sequences. Only the
alignment paths that satisfy the monotonic condition are taken into
consideration at each decoder timestep. The modified attention probabilities at
each timestep are computed recursively using a forward algorithm. A transition
agent for forward attention is further proposed, which helps the attention
mechanism to make decisions whether to move forward or stay at each decoder
timestep. Experimental results show that the proposed forward attention method
achieves faster convergence speed and higher stability than the baseline
attention method. Besides, the method of forward attention with transition
agent can also help improve the naturalness of synthetic speech and control the
speed of synthetic speech effectively.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Published in IEEE International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 2018 (ICASSP2018
DiCLET-TTS: Diffusion Model based Cross-lingual Emotion Transfer for Text-to-Speech -- A Study between English and Mandarin
While the performance of cross-lingual TTS based on monolingual corpora has
been significantly improved recently, generating cross-lingual speech still
suffers from the foreign accent problem, leading to limited naturalness.
Besides, current cross-lingual methods ignore modeling emotion, which is
indispensable paralinguistic information in speech delivery. In this paper, we
propose DiCLET-TTS, a Diffusion model based Cross-Lingual Emotion Transfer
method that can transfer emotion from a source speaker to the intra- and
cross-lingual target speakers. Specifically, to relieve the foreign accent
problem while improving the emotion expressiveness, the terminal distribution
of the forward diffusion process is parameterized into a speaker-irrelevant but
emotion-related linguistic prior by a prior text encoder with the emotion
embedding as a condition. To address the weaker emotional expressiveness
problem caused by speaker disentanglement in emotion embedding, a novel
orthogonal projection based emotion disentangling module (OP-EDM) is proposed
to learn the speaker-irrelevant but emotion-discriminative embedding. Moreover,
a condition-enhanced DPM decoder is introduced to strengthen the modeling
ability of the speaker and the emotion in the reverse diffusion process to
further improve emotion expressiveness in speech delivery. Cross-lingual
emotion transfer experiments show the superiority of DiCLET-TTS over various
competitive models and the good design of OP-EDM in learning speaker-irrelevant
but emotion-discriminative embedding.Comment: accepted by TASL
Model-based Parametric Prosody Synthesis with Deep Neural Network
Conventional statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) captures only frame-wise acoustic observations and computes probability densities at HMM state level to obtain statistical acoustic models combined with decision trees, which is therefore a purely statistical data-driven approach without explicit integration of any articulatory mechanisms found in speech production research. The present study explores an alternative paradigm, namely, model-based parametric prosody synthesis (MPPS), which integrates dynamic mechanisms of human speech production as a core component of F0 generation. In this paradigm, contextual variations in prosody are processed in two separate yet integrated stages: linguistic to motor, and motor to acoustic. Here the motor model is target approximation (TA), which generates syllable-sized F0 contours with only three motor parameters that are associated to linguistic functions. In this study, we simulate this two-stage process by linking the TA model to a deep neural network (DNN), which learns the “linguistic-motor” mapping given the “motor-acoustic” mapping provided by TA-based syllable-wise F0 production. The proposed prosody modeling system outperforms the HMM-based baseline system in both objective and subjective evaluations
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