Paper ID | SPE-33.3 | ||
Paper Title | PROSODIC REPRESENTATION LEARNING AND CONTEXTUAL SAMPLING FOR NEURAL TEXT-TO-SPEECH | ||
Authors | Sri Karlapati, Ammar Abbas, Amazon, United Kingdom; Zack Hodari, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Alexis Moinet, Arnaud Joly, Penny Karanasou, Thomas Drugman, Amazon, United Kingdom | ||
Session | SPE-33: Speech Synthesis 5: Prosody & Style | ||
Location | Gather.Town | ||
Session Time: | Thursday, 10 June, 13:00 - 13:45 | ||
Presentation Time: | Thursday, 10 June, 13:00 - 13:45 | ||
Presentation | Poster | ||
Topic | Speech Processing: [SPE-SYNT] Speech Synthesis and Generation | ||
IEEE Xplore Open Preview | Click here to view in IEEE Xplore | ||
Abstract | In this paper, we introduce Kathaka, a model trained with a novel two-stage training process for neural speech synthesis with contextually appropriate prosody. In Stage I, we learn a prosodic distribution at the sentence level from mel-spectrograms available during training. In Stage II, we propose a novel method to sample from this learnt prosodic distribution using the contextual information available in text. To do this, we use BERT on text, and graph-attention networks on parse trees extracted from text. We show a statistically significant relative improvement of 13.2% in naturalness over a strong baseline when compared to recordings. We also conduct an ablation study on variations of our sampling technique, and show a statistically significant improvement over the baseline in each case. |