Statistical text-to-speech synthesis of Spanish subtitles

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13623-3_5Online multimedia repositories are growing rapidly. However, language barriers are often difficult to overcome for many of the current and potential users. In this paper we describe a TTS Spanish sys- tem and we apply it to the synthesis of transcribed and translated video lectures. A statistical parametric speech synthesis system, in which the acoustic mapping is performed with either HMM-based or DNN-based acoustic models, has been developed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a DNN-based TTS system has been implemented for the synthesis of Spanish. A comparative objective evaluation between both models has been carried out. Our results show that DNN-based systems can reconstruct speech waveforms more accurately.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 287755 (transLectures) and ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP/2007-2013) as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) under grant agreement no 621030 (EMMA), and the Spanish MINECO Active2Trans (TIN2012-31723) research project.Piqueras Gozalbes, SR.; Del Agua Teba, MA.; Giménez Pastor, A.; Civera Saiz, J.; Juan Císcar, A. (2014). Statistical text-to-speech synthesis of Spanish subtitles. En Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages: Second International Conference, IberSPEECH 2014, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, November 19-21, 2014. Proceedings. 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Transfer Learning for Speech and Language Processing

Transfer learning is a vital technique that generalizes models trained for one setting or task to other settings or tasks. For example in speech recognition, an acoustic model trained for one language can be used to recognize speech in another language, with little or no re-training data. Transfer learning is closely related to multi-task learning (cross-lingual vs. multilingual), and is traditionally studied in the name of `model adaptation'. Recent advance in deep learning shows that transfer learning becomes much easier and more effective with high-level abstract features learned by deep models, and the `transfer' can be conducted not only between data distributions and data types, but also between model structures (e.g., shallow nets and deep nets) or even model types (e.g., Bayesian models and neural models). This review paper summarizes some recent prominent research towards this direction, particularly for speech and language processing. We also report some results from our group and highlight the potential of this very interesting research field.Comment: 13 pages, APSIPA 201

Heart Failure Anticoagulation Teach-Back Education and Readmissions

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