Recent advances in cross-lingual text-to-speech (TTS) made it possible to synthesize speech in a language foreign to a monolingual speaker. However, there is still a large gap between the pronunciation of generated cross-lingual speech and that of native speakers in terms of naturalness and intelligibility. In this paper, a triplet training scheme is proposed to enhance the cross-lingual pronunciation by allowing previously unseen content and speaker combinations to be seen during training. Proposed method introduces an extra fine-tune stage with triplet loss during training, which efficiently draws the pronunciation of the synthesized foreign speech closer to those from the native anchor speaker, while preserving the non-native speaker's timbre. Experiments are conducted based on a state-of-the-art baseline cross-lingual TTS system and its enhanced variants. All the objective and subjective evaluations show the proposed method brings significant improvement in both intelligibility and naturalness of the synthesized cross-lingual speech.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.