Naturalness

About: Naturalness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1305 publications have been published within this topic receiving 31737 citations.

Parallel Tacotron: Non-Autoregressive and Controllable TTS.

Abstract: Although neural end-to-end text-to-speech models can synthesize highly natural speech, there is still room for improvements to its efficiency and naturalness. This paper proposes a non-autoregressive neural text-to-speech model augmented with a variational autoencoder-based residual encoder. This model, called \emph{Parallel Tacotron}, is highly parallelizable during both training and inference, allowing efficient synthesis on modern parallel hardware. The use of the variational autoencoder relaxes the one-to-many mapping nature of the text-to-speech problem and improves naturalness. To further improve the naturalness, we use lightweight convolutions, which can efficiently capture local contexts, and introduce an iterative spectrogram loss inspired by iterative refinement. Experimental results show that Parallel Tacotron matches a strong autoregressive baseline in subjective evaluations with significantly decreased inference time.

Is Natural Food Healthy

Abstract: Is food’s naturalness conceptually connected to its healthiness? Answering the question requires spelling out the following: (1) What is meant by the healthiness of food? (2) What different conceptual meanings the term natural has in the context of food? (3) Are some of those meanings connected to the healthiness of food? In this paper the healthiness of food is understood narrowly as food’s accordance with nutritional needs of its eater. The connection of healthiness to the following five food-related senses of the term “natural’’ is analyzed: naturalness as nutritive suitability, naturalness as moderate need satisfaction, naturalness as lack of human influence, naturalness as authenticity, and naturalness as familiarity. It is concluded that some very common current uses of the term “natural,” such as naturalness as lack of human influence, are not conceptually connected to the healthiness of food. Nevertheless, the first two senses of naturalness are strongly conceptually connected to healthiness in the food context and the last one may be indirectly related to it. Thus, desire for natural food is not necessarily mistaken and misguided.

Listener Perception of Monopitch, Naturalness, and Intelligibility for Speakers With Parkinson's Disease.

Abstract: Purpose Given the potential significance of speech naturalness to functional and social rehabilitation outcomes, the objective of this study was to examine the effect of listener perceptions of monopitch on speech naturalness and intelligibility in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method Two short utterances were extracted from monologue samples of 16 speakers with PD and 5 age-matched adults without PD. Sixteen listeners evaluated these stimuli for monopitch, speech naturalness and intelligibility using the visual sort and rate method. Results Naive listeners can reliably judge monopitch, speech naturalness, and intelligibility with minimal familiarization. While monopitch and speech intelligibility were only moderately correlated, monopitch and speech naturalness were highly correlated. Conclusions A great deal of attention is currently being paid to improvement of vocal loudness and thus speech intelligibility in PD. Our findings suggest that prosodic characteristics such as monopitch should ...