# PASQA: Pitch-Accent-Focused Speech Quality Assessment Model Trained on Synthetic Speech with Accent Errors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20137 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20137/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [UTMOS: UTokyo-SaruLab System for VoiceMOS Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02152/) (2022)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06885/) (2024)
- [CosyVoice 2: Scalable Streaming Speech Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10117/) (2024)
- [DNSMOS: A Non-Intrusive Perceptual Objective Speech Quality metric to evaluate Noise Suppressors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15258/) (2020)
- [NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03100/) (2024)
- [NISQA: A Deep CNN-Self-Attention Model for Multidimensional Speech Quality Prediction with Crowdsourced Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09494/) (2021)
- [DNSMOS P.835: A Non-Intrusive Perceptual Objective Speech Quality Metric to Evaluate Noise Suppressors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01763/) (2021)
- [VALL-E 2: Neural Codec Language Models are Human Parity Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05370/) (2024)
- [The T05 System for The VoiceMOS Challenge 2024: Transfer Learning from Deep Image Classifier to Naturalness MOS Prediction of High-Quality Synthetic Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09305/) (2024)
- [Generalization Ability of MOS Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02635/) (2021)
- [NANSY++: Unified Voice Synthesis with Neural Analysis and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09407/) (2022)
- [VERSA: A Versatile Evaluation Toolkit for Speech, Audio, and Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17667/) (2024)
- [An Open source Implementation of ITU-T Recommendation P.808 with Validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08138/) (2020)
- [ESPnet-Codec: Comprehensive Training and Evaluation of Neural Codecs for Audio, Music, and Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15897/) (2024)
- [Domain Adversarial for Acoustic Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07690/) (2018)
- [AutoMOS: Learning a non-intrusive assessor of naturalness-of-speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09207/) (2016)
- [MOS-Bench: Benchmarking Generalization Abilities of Subjective Speech Quality Assessment Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03715/) (2024)
- [SHEET: A Multi-purpose Open-source Speech Human Evaluation Estimation Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15061/) (2025)
- [Towards Frame-level Quality Predictions of Synthetic Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10374/) (2025)
- [Audio-conditioned phonemic and prosodic annotation for building text-to-speech models from unlabeled speech data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08111/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models typically predict utterance-level naturalness MOS and can be insensitive to localized pitch-accent errors. We propose Pitch-Accent-focused Speech Quality Assessment (PASQA), which explicitly targets pitch-accent correctness. To train our model, we construct a controlled Japanese accent-error dataset by changing accent patterns using an accent-controllable text-to-speech system, and compute a pseudo accent-quality score from the accent-error rate. PASQA builds on self-supervised representations and employs mora-conditioned fusion, ranking loss, an auxiliary accent-error localization task, and speaker-invariant training. Experiments show that conventional models fail to preserve the ordering by accent-error severity, whereas PASQA achieves high ordering accuracy on both seen and unseen speakers. Further, PASQA shows stronger agreement with human accent-correctness judgments. The code is available at https://github.com/lycorp-jp/PASQA.