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Semi-Supervised Generative Modeling for Controllable Speech Synthesis (arxiv.org)
3 points by sel1 on Oct 8, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A speech generator labels a few hidden settings so they learn fixed meanings like emotion and speaking rate, which unlabeled versions never do. With just 1% of labels (30 minutes) it controls those traits with no drop in sound quality versus the best system.

Abstract

We present a novel generative model that combines state-of-the-art neural text-to-speech (TTS) with semi-supervised probabilistic latent variable models. By providing partial supervision to some of the latent variables, we are able to force them to take on consistent and interpretable purposes, which previously hasn't been possible with purely unsupervised TTS models. We demonstrate that our model is able to reliably discover and control important but rarely labelled attributes of speech, such as affect and speaking rate, with as little as 1% (30 minutes) supervision. Even at such low supervision levels we do not observe a degradation of synthesis quality compared to a state-of-the-art baseline. Audio samples are available on the web.

Raza Habib, Soroosh Mariooryad, Matt Shannon, Eric Battenberg, RJ Skerry-Ryan, Daisy Stanton, David Kao, Tom Bagby
arXiv:1910.01709 · cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.AS · submitted Oct 3, 2019
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