知能コミュニケーション研究室の岡本 真由子さん(修了生)らが、国際会議Oriental COCOSDA 2020においてBest Paper Awardを受賞しました。(2020/9/21)

国際会議Oriental COCOSDA 2020(The 23rd Conference of the Oriental COCOSDA International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques)は、2020年11月5日から7日まで、オンラインで開催されました。

• 受賞者/著者 Awardees/Authors :
  　岡本 真由子(修了生)、Sakriani Sakti、中村 哲
  
  
• 受賞研究テーマ Research theme:
  "Towards Speech Entrainment: Considering ASR Information in Speaking Rate Variation of TTS Waveform Generation"
  　State-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems successfully produce speech with a high degree of intelligibility. But TTS systems still often generate monotonous synthesized speech, unlike natural utterances. Several existing studies have addressed the issue of modeling speaking style variations in TTSs. Unfortunately, scant research has discussed the dialog and entrainment context. In this paper, we address TTS waveform generation toward speech entrainment in human-machine communication and focus on the synchronization of speaking rates that may vary within an utterance, i.e., slowing down to emphasize specific words and distinguish elements to highlight. We assume a dialog system exists and concentrate on its speech processing part. To perform such a task, we develop (1) a multi-task automatic speech recognition (ASR) that listens to the conversation partner and recognizes the content and the speaking rate and (2) a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based TTS that produces the synthesized speech of the response while entraining with the partner’s speaking rate. The evaluation is performed on a dialog corpus. Our results reveal that it is possible to entrain the input speech by synchronizing the speaking rate.
  
  
• 受賞者のコメント Awardee's voice
  　この度は栄誉ある賞をいただきとても光栄です。2年間の研究が評価さ れ大変嬉しく感じております。研究を支えてくださった先生方や研究室の皆様に、この場を借りてお礼申し上げます。
  
  
• 外部リンク Links to：
  Oriental COCOSDA　HP: https://ococosda2020.ucsy.edu.mm/index.jsp?i=0
  
  

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