Why We Should Report the Details in Subjective Evaluation of TTS More Rigorously

This paper emphasizes the importance of reporting experiment details in subjective evaluations and demonstrates how such details can significantly impact evaluation results in the field of speech synthesis. Through an analysis of 80 papers presented at INTERSPEECH 2022, we find a lack of thorough reporting on critical details such as evaluator recruitment and filtering, instructions and payments, and the geographic and linguistic backgrounds of evaluators. To illustrate the effect of these details on evaluation outcomes, we conducted mean opinion score (MOS) tests on three well-known TTS systems under different evaluation settings and we obtain at least three distinct rankings of TTS models. We urge the community to report experiment details in subjective evaluations to improve the reliability and interpretability of experimental results.Comment: Interspeech 2023 camera-ready versio

Revealing the Blind Spot of Sentence Encoder Evaluation by HEROS

Existing sentence textual similarity benchmark datasets only use a single number to summarize how similar the sentence encoder's decision is to humans'. However, it is unclear what kind of sentence pairs a sentence encoder (SE) would consider similar. Moreover, existing SE benchmarks mainly consider sentence pairs with low lexical overlap, so it is unclear how the SEs behave when two sentences have high lexical overlap. We introduce a high-quality SE diagnostic dataset, HEROS. HEROS is constructed by transforming an original sentence into a new sentence based on certain rules to form a \textit{minimal pair}, and the minimal pair has high lexical overlaps. The rules include replacing a word with a synonym, an antonym, a typo, a random word, and converting the original sentence into its negation. Different rules yield different subsets of HEROS. By systematically comparing the performance of over 60 supervised and unsupervised SEs on HEROS, we reveal that most unsupervised sentence encoders are insensitive to negation. We find the datasets used to train the SE are the main determinants of what kind of sentence pairs an SE considers similar. We also show that even if two SEs have similar performance on STS benchmarks, they can have very different behavior on HEROS. Our result reveals the blind spot of traditional STS benchmarks when evaluating SEs.Comment: ACL 2023 repl4nlp (representation learning for NLP) workshop poster paper. Dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/dcml0714/Hero

VoiceBank-2023: A Multi-Speaker Mandarin Speech Corpus for Constructing Personalized TTS Systems for the Speech Impaired

Services of personalized TTS systems for the Mandarin-speaking speech impaired are rarely mentioned. Taiwan started the VoiceBanking project in 2020, aiming to build a complete set of services to deliver personalized Mandarin TTS systems to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. This paper reports the corpus design, corpus recording, data purging and correction for the corpus, and evaluations of the developed personalized TTS systems, for the VoiceBanking project. The developed corpus is named after the VoiceBank-2023 speech corpus because of its release year. The corpus contains 29.78 hours of utterances with prompts of short paragraphs and common phrases spoken by 111 native Mandarin speakers. The corpus is labeled with information about gender, degree of speech impairment, types of users, transcription, SNRs, and speaking rates. The VoiceBank-2023 is available by request for non-commercial use and welcomes all parties to join the VoiceBanking project to improve the services for the speech impaired.Comment: submitted to 26th International Conference of the ORIENTAL-COCOSD

Discovery in Drell-Yan Processes at the LHC

We study the Drell-Yan process mediated by a new bosonic resonance at the LHC. The bosons of spin-0, 1, and 2 with the most general leading-order couplings to Standard Model fermions and gluons are considered, which provide a model-independent formulation for future exploration of the resonance properties, such as its spin, mass and couplings. In the case of neutral resonances, we demonstrate how the shapes of the kinematical distributions change as one varies the chiral couplings of the quarks and leptons, and show how to analyze the couplings by making use of the forward-backward asymmetry. In the case of charged resonances, we propose a novel technique to effectively reconstruct the angular distribution in the center-of-mass frame, to a large extent avoiding the two-fold ambiguity due to the missing neutrino. Similar to the case of a neutral resonance, the spin information of the resonance can be extracted unambiguously, and chiral couplings and the asymmetries can be explored in a statistical manner. With the current LHC data, we present bounds on the mass and cross section times branching fraction of the new resonance and estimate the future reach.Comment: 22 pages, 18 figures, 6 table

Long-term culture captures injury-repair cycles of colonic stem cells

The colonic epithelium can undergo multiple rounds of damage and repair, often in response to excessive inflammation. The responsive stem cell that mediates this process is unclear, in part because of a lack of in vitro models that recapitulate key epithelial changes that occur in vivo during damage and repair. Here, we identify a Hop