In most cases, bilingual TTS needs to handle three types of input scripts:
first language only, second language only, and second language embedded in the
first language. In the latter two situations, the pronunciation and intonation
of the second language are usually quite different due to the influence of the
first language. Therefore, it is a big challenge to accurately model the
pronunciation and intonation of the second language in different contexts
without mutual interference. This paper builds a Mandarin-English TTS system to
acquire more standard spoken English speech from a monolingual Chinese speaker.
We introduce phonology embedding to capture the English differences between
different phonology. Embedding mask is applied to language embedding for
distinguishing information between different languages and to phonology
embedding for focusing on English expression. We specially design an embedding
strength modulator to capture the dynamic strength of language and phonology.
Experiments show that our approach can produce significantly more natural and
standard spoken English speech of the monolingual Chinese speaker. From
analysis, we find that suitable phonology control contributes to better
performance in different scenarios.

该研究构建了一个汉英文字转语音系统，引入了语音学嵌入以捕捉不同语音之间的区别，并在嵌入强度的调节和合适的语音控制方面进行设计，以便在不同情境下产生更为自然标准的英语语音。