Venue: Interspeech 2023 Workshop SSW

Reviews:

final_score: rating: 9: Top 15% of accepted papers, strong accept
review_content: ***** Key Strength of the paper

- in-depth evaluation and analysis
- timely proposition with a flexible solution
- paper clearly written

***** Main Weakness of the paper

***** Novelty/Originality, taking into account the relevance of the work for the SSW audience

The topic addressed is highly relevant for the workshop, and the proposition is novel in that it addresses an important problem faced by the TTS community in a flexible manner.

***** Technical Correctness

The evaluation and analysis are thorough.

***** Quality of References

The references seem to be adequate and well balanced

***** Clarity of Presentation

The paper is clearly written and easy to follow

***** Suggestions for improvement

These suggestions remain minor
- It would be clearer if the reference of the different elements of the figure follows the same
- Instead of MUSHRA-like, I think the author should explicitly state the difference to MUSHRA (which I suspect is the lack of anchors)
- I think the title/caption of Figure 1 is incorrect as it suggests that the overall model is the LST instead of the module
- The colours scheme is a good idea, but some parts seem to have been missed (e.g., 4.6 for committed in Table 2)
review_title: Timely solution to address prosody modelling for Expressive TTS with a thorough analysis

final_score: rating: 7: Good paper, accept
review_content: Key Strength of the paper: Generally well-written, technically sound, includes both objective and subjective evaluation, good summary of related work.

Main Weakness of the paper: Lack of motivation for certain design decisions. (1) How was the set of 12 styles established; how are they defined? (2) How was it established that the actress indeed produced the target style? (3) The classical acoustic-prosodic features (pitch, duration, intensity) are modeled, but expressive speech is strongly conveyed by changes in voice quality, which supposedly contributes to convey (some of) the 12 styles, too. No attempt was made to model VQ, nor was it even mentioned.

Novelty/Originality, taking into account the relevance of the work for the SSW audience: Highly relevant.

Technical Correctness. The work appears to be technically solid. Some details are lacking that would allow a reproduction of the modeling and experiment, primarily details about the definition of expressive styles and the elicitation and validation procedure.

Suggestions for improvement: see above.

Quality of References: Generally adequate, but Liberman/Prince and Selkirk are not exactly the ideal references for expressive speech.

Clarity of Presentation: Generally clear (but see under weaknesses). The paper would benefit from proofreading for spurious errors (perceptive -> perceptual, vary low -> very low, etc., as well as a few grammatical errors).
review_title: Local Style Tokens: should be accepted

Meta-review: Dear authors,

SSW2003 received 45 papers. The acceptance rate is 82%. We are pleased to inform you that your paper has been ACCEPTED by the SSW2023 Programme Committee. 

Please read the reviews carefully and submit your camera-ready paper by June 28th. Most of reviewers performed a detailed review. Please answer to their questions and take into account their comments. Note that camera-ready papers are credited of one extra page to allow authors to consider reviewers’ suggestions. So max 7 pages in total including figures & refs.

Regards,
The SSW organizing chairs
Decision: Accept