Zero-Shot Foreign Accent Conversion without a Native Reference

Waris Quamer1, Anurag Das1, John Levis2, Evgeny Chukharev-Hudilainen2, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna1

1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, USA

2Department of English, Iowa State University, USA

Notes

Experiment : Evaluating the reference-free golden speakers

L2 speaker Text Input speech Reference-Free Accent conversion (Baseline) Reference-Free Accent conversion (Proposed)
YKWK He had fulfilled his duty and paid properly.
But already he had composed himself.
The Russian music player, the Count, was her obedient slave.
TXHC What an excited whispering and conferring took place.
Thus he turned the tenets and jargon of psychology back on me.
You were making them talk shop, Ruth charged him.

References

[1] G. Zhao et al., "L2-ARCTIC: A non-native English speech corpus," in Proc. Interspeech, 2018, pp. 2783-2787.

[2] G. Zhao, S. Ding, and R. Gutierrez-Osuna., "Converting Foreign Accent Speech Without a Reference." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 2021, pp.2367-2381.