The neutral, or floating, tone of Mandarin Chinese is a tone with an enigmatic set of properties. It has been described as a reduced tone, or as a tone that sometimes is lexically fixed but that can also be toneless.
arXiv:2607. 04064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised syllabic tokenization aims to learn discrete syllabic tokens that capture latent linguistic content-related structure from raw speech.
By Ryota Komatsu, Kota Kawakita, Takuma Okamoto, Takahiro Shinozaki
Phonetic forced alignment is a key technique in phonetic research, yet existing alignment systems lack specialized models for low-resource language varieties. We address this by training text-dependent and text-independent aligners for Chengdu Mandarin using a 17-hour corpus and a custom G2P dictionary.
arXiv:2606. 11371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spoken language, whether produced by humans or large language models (LLM), unfolds over time with varying semantic content.
By Han-Jen Chang, Yasir \c{C}atal, Angelika Wolman, Agust\'in Ib\'a\~nez, David Smith, I-Wen Su, Kai-Yuan Cheng, Georg Northoff
Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) have substantially improved speech quality and voice cloning fidelity. However, many zero-shot TTS systems still depend on audio prompt transcripts at inference time.
arXiv:2607. 09020v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phone segmentation and recognition are inherently related tasks, yet modern approaches typically model them separately.
By Shikhar Bharadwaj, Kwanghee Choi, Stephen McIntosh, Chin-Jou Li, Eunjung Yeo, Daisuke Saito, Nobuaki Minematsu, Shinji Watanabe, Jian Zhu, David Harwath, David R. Mortensen