Learning Multilingual Expressive Speech Representation for Prosody Prediction without Parallel Data

Author:

Jarod Duret, Titouan Parcollet, Yannick Estève

Keyword:

Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, Audio and Speech Processing, Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS), Computation and Language (cs.CL), Sound (cs.SD)

journal:

Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW), Aug 2023, Grenoble, France

date:

2023-06-28 16:00:00

Abstract

We propose a method for speech-to-speech emotionpreserving translation that operates at the level of discrete speech units. Our approach relies on the use of multilingual emotion embedding that can capture affective information in a language-independent manner. We show that this embedding can be used to predict the pitch and duration of speech units in a target language, allowing us to resynthesize the source speech signal with the same emotional content. We evaluate our approach to English and French speech signals and show that it outperforms a baseline method that does not use emotional information, including when the emotion embedding is extracted from a different language. Even if this preliminary study does not address directly the machine translation issue, our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for cross-lingual emotion preservation in the context of speech resynthesis.

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