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12th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW12)2023Recent works have shown that modelling raw waveform directly from text in an end-to-end (E2E) fashion produces more natural-sounding speech than traditional neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems based on a cascade or two-stage approach. However, current E2E state-of-the-art models are computationally complex and memory-consuming, making them unsuitable for real-time offline on-device applications in low-resource
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12th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW12)2023We present a scalable method to produce high quality emphasis for text-to-speech (TTS) that does not require recordings or annotations. Many TTS models include a phoneme duration model. A simple but effective method to achieve emphasized speech consists in increasing the predicted duration of the emphasised word. We show that this is significantly better than spectrogram modification techniques improving
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KDD 20232023Sequential recommendation aims to model dynamic user behavior from historical interactions. Existing methods rely on either explicit item IDs or general textual features for sequence modeling to understand user preferences. While promising, these approaches still struggle to model cold-start items or transfer knowledge to new datasets. In this paper, we propose to model user preferences and item features
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ACL 2023 Workshop on SustaiNLP2023Personalized dialogue agents (DAs) powered by large pre-trained language models (PLMs) often rely on explicit persona descriptions to maintain personality consistency. However, such descriptions may not always be available or may pose privacy concerns. To tackle this bottleneck, we introduce PersonaPKT, a lightweight transfer learning approach that can build persona-consistent dialogue models without explicit
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ACL 20232023Bias in machine learning models can be an issue when the models are trained on particular types of data that do not generalize well, causing under performance in certain groups of users. In this work, we focus on reducing the bias related to new customers in a digital voice assistant system. It is observed that natural language understanding models often have lower performance when dealing with requests
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June 05, 2019Today, customer exchanges with Alexa are generally either one-shot requests, like “Alexa, what’s the weather?”, or interactions that require multiple requests to complete more complex tasks. -
May 21, 2019A person’s tone of voice can tell you a lot about how they’re feeling. Not surprisingly, emotion recognition is an increasingly popular conversational-AI research topic.
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May 16, 2019Text normalization is an important process in conversational AI. If an Alexa customer says, “book me a table at 5:00 p.m.”, the automatic speech recognizer will transcribe the time as “five p m”. Before a skill can handle this request, “five p m” will need to be converted to “5:00PM”. Once Alexa has processed the request, it needs to synthesize the response — say, “Is 6:30 p.m. okay?” Here, 6:30PM will be converted to “six thirty p m” for the text-to-speech synthesizer. We call the process of converting “5:00PM” to “five p m” text normalization and its counterpart — converting “five p m” to “5:00PM” — inverse text normalization.
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May 13, 2019Recently, we published a paper showing that training a neural network to do language processing in English, then retraining it in German, drastically reduces the amount of German-language training data required to achieve a given level of performance.
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May 03, 2019Using cosine similarity rather than dot product to compare vectors helps prevent "catastrophic forgetting".
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May 02, 2019Traditionally, Alexa has interpreted customer requests according to their intents and slots. If you say, “Alexa, play ‘What’s Going On?’ by Marvin Gaye,” the intent should be PlayMusic, and “‘What’s Going On?’” and “Marvin Gaye” should fill the slots SongName and ArtistName.
