For text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, prosodic structure prediction (PSP) plays
an important role in producing natural and intelligible speech. Although
inter-utterance linguistic information can influence the speech interpretation
of the target utterance, previous works on PSP mainly focus on utilizing
intrautterance linguistic information of the current utterance only. This work
proposes to use inter-utterance linguistic information to improve the
performance of PSP. Multi-level contextual information, which includes both
inter-utterance and intrautterance linguistic information, is extracted by a
hierarchical encoder from character level, utterance level and discourse level
of the input text. Then a multi-task learning (MTL) decoder predicts prosodic
boundaries from multi-level contextual information. Objective evaluation
results on two datasets show that our method achieves better F1 scores in
predicting prosodic word (PW), prosodic phrase (PPH) and intonational phrase
(IPH). It demonstrates the effectiveness of using multi-level contextual
information for PSP. Subjective preference tests also indicate the naturalness
of synthesized speeches are improved.

利用多级语境信息，通过多任务学习解码器，本研究提出了一种改进语音生成自然性的方法，通过使用跨发话语之间的语言信息来预测韵律边界，从而在两个数据集上实现了更好的预测效果。

多层次上下文信息提升普通话韵律结构预测

Improving Mandarin Prosodic Structure Prediction with Multi-level  Contextual Information

Semantic object parsing is a fundamental task for understanding objects in
detail in computer vision community, where incorporating multi-level contextual
information is critical for achieving such fine-grained pixel-level
recognition. Prior methods often leverage the contextual information through
post-processing predicted confidence maps. In this work, we propose a novel
deep Local-Global Long Short-Term Memory (LG-LSTM) architecture to seamlessly
incorporate short-distance and long-distance spatial dependencies into the
feature learning over all pixel positions. In each LG-LSTM layer, local
guidance from neighboring positions and global guidance from the whole image
are imposed on each position to better exploit complex local and global
contextual information. Individual LSTMs for distinct spatial dimensions are
also utilized to intrinsically capture various spatial layouts of semantic
parts in the images, yielding distinct hidden and memory cells of each position
for each dimension. In our parsing approach, several LG-LSTM layers are stacked
and appended to the intermediate convolutional layers to directly enhance
visual features, allowing network parameters to be learned in an end-to-end
way. The long chains of sequential computation by stacked LG-LSTM layers also
enable each pixel to sense a much larger region for inference benefiting from
the memorization of previous dependencies in all positions along all
dimensions. Comprehensive evaluations on three public datasets well demonstrate
the significant superiority of our LG-LSTM over other state-of-the-art methods.

该研究提出了一种新型的 LG-LSTM 框架，结合局部和全局信息，以实现计算机视觉中识别语义对象的精细像素级别识别，有着比其他现有方法更优越的性能。