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Applying Feature Underspecified Lexicon Phonological Features in Multilingual Text-to-Speech

by Cong Zhang¹, Huinan Zeng², Huang Liu³, Jiewen Zheng³

¹ Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands; ²Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; ³ Shengrurenxin Ltd., Beijing, China

Abstract

This study investigates whether the phonological features derived from the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon model can be applied in text-to-speech systems to generate native and non-native speech in English and Mandarin. We present a mapping of ARPABET/pinyin to SAMPA/SAMPA-SC and then to phonological features. This mapping was tested for whether it could lead to the successful generation of native, non-native, and code-switched speech in the two languages. We ran two experiments, one with a small dataset and one with a larger dataset. The results supported that phonological features could be used as a feasible input system for languages in or not in the train data, although further investigation is needed to improve model performance. The results lend support to FUL by presenting successfully synthesised output, and by having the output carrying a source-language accent when synthesising a language not in the training data. The TTS process stimulated human second language acquisition process and thus also confirm FUL’s ability to account for acquisition.

Keywords: phonological feature, text-to-speech, multilingual TTS, non-native speech, FUL model

Demo

Visit https://congzhang365.github.io/feature_tts/ for demo audio.

Cite as

Zhang, C., Zeng, H., Liu, H., Zheng, J. (2021) Applying Feature Underspecified Lexicon Phonological Features in Multilingual Text-to-Speech. 
Retrived from https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07228.

or use the following BibTex:

@misc{https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2204.07228,
  doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2204.07228},
  
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07228},
  
  author = {Zhang, Cong and Zeng, Huinan and Liu, Huang and Zheng, Jiewen},
  
  title = {Applying Feature Underspecified Lexicon Phonological Features in Multilingual Text-to-Speech},
  
  publisher = {arXiv},
  
  year = {2022},
  
  copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International}
}