| Paper ID | SPE-16.4 |
| Paper Title |
A UNIVERSAL BERT-BASED FRONT-END MODEL FOR MANDARIN TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYNTHESIS |
| Authors |
Zilong Bai, Beibei Hu, Ajmide Media Co., Ltd., China |
| Session | SPE-16: Speech Synthesis 4: Front-end |
| Location | Gather.Town |
| Session Time: | Wednesday, 09 June, 13:00 - 13:45 |
| Presentation Time: | Wednesday, 09 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 |
| Virtual Presentation |
Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference |
| Abstract |
The front-end text processing module is considered as an essential part that influences the intelligibility and naturalness of a Mandarin text-to-speech system significantly. For commercial text-to-speech systems, the Mandarin front-end should meet the requirements of high accuracy and low time latency while also ensuring maintainability. In this paper, we propose a universal BERT-based model that can be used for various tasks in the Mandarin front-end without changing its architecture. The feature extractor and classifiers in the model are shared for several sub-tasks, which improves the expandability and maintainability. We trained and evaluated the model with polyphone disambiguation, text normalization, and prosodic boundary prediction for single task modules and multi-task learning. Results show that, the model maintains high performance for single task modules and shows higher accuracy and lower time latency for multi-task modules, indicating that the proposed universal front-end model is promising as a maintainable Mandarin front-end for commercial applications. |
