Expressive Speech Retrieval using Natural Language Descriptions of Speaking Style

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Hauptverfasser: Kang, Wonjune, Roy, Deb
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kang, Wonjune
Roy, Deb
author_facet Kang, Wonjune
Roy, Deb
contents We introduce the task of expressive speech retrieval, where the goal is to retrieve speech utterances spoken in a given style based on a natural language description of that style. While prior work has primarily focused on performing speech retrieval based on what was said in an utterance, we aim to do so based on how something was said. We train speech and text encoders to embed speech and text descriptions of speaking styles into a joint latent space, which enables using free-form text prompts describing emotions or styles as queries to retrieve matching expressive speech segments. We perform detailed analyses of various aspects of our proposed framework, including encoder architectures, training criteria for effective cross-modal alignment, and prompt augmentation for improved generalization to arbitrary text queries. Experiments on multiple datasets encompassing 22 speaking styles demonstrate that our approach achieves strong retrieval performance as measured by Recall@k.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11187
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Expressive Speech Retrieval using Natural Language Descriptions of Speaking Style
Kang, Wonjune
Roy, Deb
Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Sound
We introduce the task of expressive speech retrieval, where the goal is to retrieve speech utterances spoken in a given style based on a natural language description of that style. While prior work has primarily focused on performing speech retrieval based on what was said in an utterance, we aim to do so based on how something was said. We train speech and text encoders to embed speech and text descriptions of speaking styles into a joint latent space, which enables using free-form text prompts describing emotions or styles as queries to retrieve matching expressive speech segments. We perform detailed analyses of various aspects of our proposed framework, including encoder architectures, training criteria for effective cross-modal alignment, and prompt augmentation for improved generalization to arbitrary text queries. Experiments on multiple datasets encompassing 22 speaking styles demonstrate that our approach achieves strong retrieval performance as measured by Recall@k.
title Expressive Speech Retrieval using Natural Language Descriptions of Speaking Style
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11187