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N"ushuVoice: Reviving the Voice of Endangered N"ushu with Pitch-Aware Text-to-Speech

arXiv 2606.09295 ↗First posted 8 Jun 2026cs.CLcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

N"ushu is an endangered phonetic script historically used by women in Jiangyong County, southern Hunan, China. While existing computational studies of N"ushu mainly focus on textual digitization and visual recognition, the acoustic reconstruction of its authentic pronunciation remains largely unexplored. Building a N"ushu text-to-speech (TTS) system is particularly challenging because available recordings are extremely limited and mostly consist of isolated syllable-level pronunciations rather than natural sentence-level utterances. In this work, we introduce N"ushuVoice, the first TTS benchmark for N"ushu. We construct a sentence-level N"ushu text-to-audio dataset that aligns standardized Unicode N"ushu text, phonetic transcriptions, standard Chinese translations, and archival recordings. To synthesize speech under this extreme low-resource setting, we propose N"ushu-PitchVITS, an F0-conditioned VITS framework that leverages N"ushu's five-level pitch notation as an explicit prosodic inductive bias. Experimental results show that N"ushu-PitchVITS outperforms strong TTS baselines in spectral fidelity, pitch reconstruction, and human-rated intelligibility. We publicly release the dataset and code at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Nvshu-TTS-2EB6.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 8 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2026.

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References · 8

  1. 2017Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictionscited by 800
  2. 2020FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speechcited by 710
  3. 2021Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speechcited by 555
  4. 2024F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matchingcited by 353
  5. 2020Glow-TTS: A Generative Flow for Text-to-Speech via Monotonic Alignment Searchcited by 269
  6. 2020LRSpeech: Extremely Low-Resource Speech Synthesis and Recognitioncited by 43
  7. 2023AI Nushu: An Exploration of Language Emergence in Sisterhood -Through the Lens of Computational Linguisticscited by 4
  8. 2024NushuRescue: Revitalization of the Endangered Nushu Language with AIcited by 1

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