2022/10/18 by Yuta Matsunaga, Matsunaga, Yuta, Takaaki Saeki +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and dialogue systems #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.09815
openalex publication_date 2022/10/18 · openalex created_date 2022/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a training method with linguistic speech regularization that improves the robustness of spontaneous speech synthesis methods with filled pause (FP) insertion. Spontaneous speech synthesis is aimed at producing speech with human-like disfluencies, such as FPs. Because modeling the complex data distribution of spontaneous speech with a rich FP vocabulary is challenging, the quality of FP-inserted synthetic speech is often limited. To address this issue, we present a method for synthesizing spontaneous speech that improves robustness to diverse FP insertions. Regularization is used to stabilize the synthesis of the linguistic speech (i.e., non-FP) elements. To further improve robustness to diverse FP insertions, it utilizes pseudo-FPs sampled using an FP word prediction model as well as ground-truth FPs. Our experiments demonstrated that the proposed method improves the naturalness of synthetic speech with ground-truth and predicted FPs by 0.24 and 0.26, respectively.