2019/04/13 by Tao Tu, Yuan-Jui Chen, Tu, Tao +5 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #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.1904.06508
openalex publication_date 2019/04/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
End-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) has shown great success on large quantities of paired text plus speech data. However, laborious data collection remains difficult for at least 95% of the languages over the world, which hinders the development of TTS in different languages. In this paper, we aim to build TTS systems for such low-resource (target) languages where only very limited paired data are available. We show such TTS can be effectively constructed by transferring knowledge from a high-resource (source) language. Since the model trained on source language cannot be directly applied to target language due to input space mismatch, we propose a method to learn a mapping between source and target linguistic symbols. Benefiting from this learned mapping, pronunciation information can be preserved throughout the transferring procedure. Preliminary experiments show that we only need around 15 minutes of paired data to obtain a relatively good TTS system. Furthermore, analytic studies demonstrated that the automatically discovered mapping correlate well with the phonetic expertise.