  Cross-speaker style transfer (CSST) in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis aims at
transferring a speaking style to the synthesised speech in a target speaker's
voice. Most previous CSST approaches rely on expensive high-quality data
carrying desired speaking style during training and require a reference
utterance to obtain speaking style descriptors as conditioning on the
generation of a new sentence. This work presents Referee, a robust
reference-free CSST approach for expressive TTS, which fully leverages
low-quality data to learn speaking styles from text. Referee is built by
cascading a text-to-style (T2S) model with a style-to-wave (S2W) model.
Phonetic PosteriorGram (PPG), phoneme-level pitch and energy contours are
adopted as fine-grained speaking style descriptors, which are predicted from
text using the T2S model. A novel pretrain-refinement method is adopted to
learn a robust T2S model by only using readily accessible low-quality data. The
S2W model is trained with high-quality target data, which is adopted to
effectively aggregate style descriptors and generate high-fidelity speech in
the target speaker's voice. Experimental results are presented, showing that
Referee outperforms a global-style-token (GST)-based baseline approach in CSST.

Audio and Speech Processing;Computation and Language;Sound