Privacy-preserving Prosody Representation Learning

Kevin Everson, Mari Ostendorf


Abstract
Speech representations that capture prosodic information can be useful for both understanding and generation. However, speaker characteristics are reflected in acoustic-prosodic features (e.g., pitch). To address privacy concerns from the leakage of identity information, we propose a new self-supervised approach to learning prosody representations that incorporates speaker disentanglement strategies. We evaluate our encoder on three tasks to probe representation capabilities, including pitch reconstruction and detection of different prosodic events. Our encoder outperforms raw prosody and HuBERT-base baselines, achieving strong speaker disentanglement without adverse impact on prosody-related downstream tasks.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-short.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
310–315
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-short.26/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kevin Everson and Mari Ostendorf. 2026. Privacy-preserving Prosody Representation Learning. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 310–315, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Privacy-preserving Prosody Representation Learning (Everson & Ostendorf, ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-short.26.pdf
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