AI RESEARCH

Lexical Tone is Hard to Quantize: Probing Discrete Speech Units in Mandarin and Yor\`ub\'a

arXiv CS.CL

ArXi:2604.07467v1 Announce Type: new Discrete speech units (DSUs) are derived by quantising representations from models trained using self-supervised learning (SSL). They are a popular representation for a wide variety of spoken language tasks, including those where prosody matters. DSUs are especially convenient for tasks where text and speech are jointly modelled, such as text-to-speech and multimodal dialogue systems.