2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDSPE-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
SessionSPE-16: Speech Synthesis 4: Front-end
LocationGather.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.