AI RESEARCH

Computational Narrative Understanding for Expressive Text-to-Speech

arXiv CS.CL

ArXi:2509.04072v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) have been driven by large, multi-domain speech corpora, yet the expressive potential of audiobook data remains underexamined. We argue that human-narrated audiobooks, particularly fictional works, contain rich and diverse prosodic cues arising from the natural alternation between neutral narration and expressive character dialogue. Building from this observation, we