MacST: Multi-Accent Speech Synthesis via Text Transliteration for Accent Conversion

Abstract: In accented voice conversion or accent conversion, we seek to convert the accent in speech from one another while preserving speaker identity and semantic content. In this study, we formulate a novel method for creating multi-accented speech samples, thus pairs of accented speech samples by the same speaker, through text transliteration for training accent conversion systems. We begin by generating transliterated text with LLMs, which is then fed into multilingual TTS models to synthesize accented English speech. As a reference system, we built a sequence-to-sequence model on the synthetic parallel corpus for accent conversion. We validated the proposed method for both native and non-native English speakers. Subjective and objective evaluations further validate our dataset's effectiveness in accent conversion studies.