Deep Neural Network Based 3D Articulatory Movement Prediction Using Both Text and Audio Inputs

Robust and accurate predicting of articulatory movements has various important applications, such as human-machine interaction. Various approaches have been proposed to solve the acoustic-articulatory mapping problem. However, their precision is not high enough with only acoustic features available. Recently, deep neural network (DNN) has brought tremendous success in many fields. To increase the accuracy, on the one hand, we propose a new network architecture called bottleneck squeeze-and-excitation recurrent convolutional neural network (BSERCNN) for articulatory movement prediction. On the one hand, by introducing the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) module, our BSERCNN can model the interdependencies and relationships between channels and that makes our model more efficiency. On the other hand, phoneme-level text features and acoustic features are integrated together as inputs to BSERCNN for better performance. Experiments show that BSERCNN achieves the state-of-the-art root-mean-squared error (RMSE) 0.563 mm and the correlation coefficient 0.954 with both text and audio inputs.