Transformer-Based Text-To-Speech With Weighted Forced Attention

This paper investigates state-of-the-art Transformer- and FastSpeech-based high-fidelity neural text-to-speech (TTS) with full-context label input for pitch accent languages. The aim is to realize faster training than conventional Tacotron-based models. Introducing phoneme durations into Tacotron-based TTS models improves both synthesis quality and stability. Therefore, a Transformer-based acoustic model with weighted forced attention obtained from phoneme durations is proposed to improve synthesis accuracy and stability, where both encoder–decoder attention and forced attention are used with a weighting factor. Furthermore, FastSpeech without a duration predictor, in which the phoneme durations are predicted by another conventional model, is also investigated. The results of experiments using a Japanese female corpus and the WaveGlow vocoder indicate that the proposed Transformer using forced attention with a weighting factor of 0.5 outperforms other models, and removing the duration predictor from FastSpeech improves synthesis quality, although the proposed weighted forced attention does not improve synthesis stability.