# Cross-Dialect Text-To-Speech in Pitch-Accent Language Incorporating Multi-Dialect Phoneme-Level BERT

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.07265 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07265/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [Towards End-to-End Prosody Transfer for Expressive Speech Synthesis with Tacotron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09047/) (2018)
- [PnG BERT: Augmented BERT on Phonemes and Graphemes for Neural TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15060/) (2021)
- [Robust and fine-grained prosody control of end-to-end speech synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02122/) (2018)
- [Fine-grained robust prosody transfer for single-speaker neural text-to-speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02479/) (2019)
- [Phoneme-Level BERT for Enhanced Prosody of Text-to-Speech with Grapheme Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08810/) (2023)
- [CopyCat2: A Single Model for Multi-Speaker TTS and Many-to-Many Fine-Grained Prosody Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13443/) (2022)
- [Accent-VITS:accent transfer for end-to-end TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16850/) (2023)
- [Investigation of Japanese PnG BERT language model in text-to-speech synthesis for pitch accent language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08321/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We explore cross-dialect text-to-speech (CD-TTS), a task to synthesize learned speakers' voices in non-native dialects, especially in pitch-accent languages. CD-TTS is important for developing voice agents that naturally communicate with people across regions. We present a novel TTS model comprising three sub-modules to perform competitively at this task. We first train a backbone TTS model to synthesize dialect speech from a text conditioned on phoneme-level accent latent variables (ALVs) extracted from speech by a reference encoder. Then, we train an ALV predictor to predict ALVs tailored to a target dialect from input text leveraging our novel multi-dialect phoneme-level BERT. We conduct multi-dialect TTS experiments and evaluate the effectiveness of our model by comparing it with a baseline derived from conventional dialect TTS methods. The results show that our model improves the dialectal naturalness of synthetic speech in CD-TTS.