CAMP: a Two-Stage Approach to Modelling Prosody in Context

Zack Hodari; Alexis Moinet; Sri Karlapati; Jaime Lorenzo-Trueba; Thomas Merritt; Arnaud Joly; Ammar Abbas; Penny Karanasou; Thomas Drugman

arXiv · 2011.01175

CAMP: a Two-Stage Approach to Modelling Prosody in Context

Zack Hodari·Alexis Moinet·Sri Karlapati·Jaime Lorenzo-Trueba·Thomas Merritt·Arnaud Joly·Ammar Abbas·Penny Karanasou·Thomas Drugman

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Abstract

Prosody is an integral part of communication, but remains an open problem in state-of-the-art speech synthesis. There are two major issues faced when modelling prosody: (1) prosody varies at a slower rate compared with other content in the acoustic signal (e.g. segmental information and background noise); (2) determining appropriate prosody without sufficient context is an ill-posed problem. In this paper, we propose solutions to both these issues. To mitigate the challenge of modelling a slow-varying signal, we learn to disentangle prosodic information using a word level representation. To alleviate the ill-posed nature of prosody modelling, we use syntactic and semantic information derived from text to learn a context-dependent prior over our prosodic space. Our Context-Aware Model of Prosody (CAMP) outperforms the state-of-the-art technique, closing the gap with natural speech by 26%. We also find that replacing attention with a jointly-trained duration model improves prosody significantly.

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BibTeX RIS

Zack Hodari, Alexis Moinet, Sri Karlapati, Jaime Lorenzo-Trueba, Thomas Merritt, Arnaud Joly, Ammar Abbas, Penny Karanasou, Thomas Drugman. 2020-11-02. CAMP: a Two-Stage Approach to Modelling Prosody in Context. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01175

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