A Unified Front-End Framework for English Text-to-Speech Synthesis

The front-end is a critical component of English text-to-speech (TTS) systems, responsible for extracting linguistic features that are essential for a text-to-speech model to synthesize speech, such as prosodies and phonemes. The English TTS front-end typically consists of a text normalization (TN) module, a prosody word prosody phrase (PWPP) module, and a grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) module. However, current research on the English TTS front-end focuses solely on individual modules, neglecting the interdependence between them and resulting in sub-optimal performance for each module. Therefore, this paper proposes a unified frontend framework that captures the dependencies among the English TTS front-end modules. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in all modules.