2022/06/16 by Ziqian Dai, Jianwei Yu, Dai, Ziqian +13 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #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.2206.07956
openalex publication_date 2022/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Prosodic boundary plays an important role in text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) in terms of naturalness and readability. However, the acquisition of prosodic boundary labels relies on manual annotation, which is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose to automatically extract prosodic boundary labels from text-audio data via a neural text-speech model with pre-trained audio encoders. This model is pre-trained on text and speech data separately and jointly fine-tuned on TTS data in a triplet format: speech, text, prosody. The experimental results on both automatic evaluation and human evaluation demonstrate that: 1) the proposed text-speech prosody annotation framework significantly outperforms text-only baselines; 2) the quality of automatic prosodic boundary annotations is comparable to human annotations; 3) TTS systems trained with model-annotated boundaries are slightly better than systems that use manual ones.