Llama-VITS: Enhancing TTS Synthesis with Semantic Awareness

Xincan Feng, Akifumi Yoshimoto

Abstract
Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have seen Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) excel at producing high-quality text for various purposes. Notably, in Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems, the integration of BERT for semantic token generation has underscored the importance of semantic content in producing coherent speech outputs. Despite this, the specific utility of LLMs in enhancing TTS synthesis remains considerably limited. This research introduces an innovative approach, Llama-VITS, which enhances TTS synthesis by enriching the semantic content of text using LLM. Llama-VITS integrates semantic embeddings from Llama2 with the VITS model, a leading end-to-end TTS framework. By leveraging Llama2 for the primary speech synthesis process, our experiments demonstrate that Llama-VITS matches the naturalness of the original VITS (ORI-VITS) and those incorporate BERT (BERT-VITS), on the LJSpeech dataset, a substantial collection of neutral, clear speech. Moreover, our method significantly enhances emotive expressiveness on the EmoV_DB_bea_sem dataset, a curated selection of emotionally consistent speech from the EmoV_DB dataset, highlighting its potential to generate emotive speech.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.931
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
10642–10656
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.931
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xincan Feng and Akifumi Yoshimoto. 2024. Llama-VITS: Enhancing TTS Synthesis with Semantic Awareness. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 10642–10656, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Llama-VITS: Enhancing TTS Synthesis with Semantic Awareness (Feng & Yoshimoto, LREC-COLING 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.931.pdf
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