Audio Samples from "FORWARD ATTENTION IN SEQUENCE-TO-SEQUENCE ACOUSTIC MODELING FOR SPEECH SYNTHESIS"

Authors: Jing-Xuan Zhang, Zhen-Hua Ling, Li-Rong Dai

Abstract: This paper proposes a forward attention method for the sequence-to-sequence acoustic modeling of speech synthesis. This method is motivated by the nature of monotonic alignment from phone sequences to acoustic sequences. Only the alignment paths that satisfy the monotonic condition are taken into consideration at each decoder timestep. The modified attention probabilities at each timestep are computed recursively using a forward algorithm. A transition agent for forward attention is further proposed, which helps the attention mechanism to make decisions whether to move forward or stay at each timestep. Experimental results show that the proposed forward attention method achieves faster convergence speed and higher stability than the baseline attention method. Besides, the method of forward attention with transition agent can also help improve the naturalness of synthetic speech and control the speed of synthetic speech effectively.

• Stability Demo

• Naturalness Demo

• Speed Control Demo