Argument mining aims to detect all possible argumentative components and identify their relationships automatically. As a thriving task in natural language processing, there has been a large amount of corpus for academic study and application development in this field. However, the research in this area is still constrained by the inherent limitations of existing datasets. Specifically, all the publicly available datasets are relatively small in scale, and few of them provide information from other modalities to facilitate the learning process. Moreover, the statements and expressions in these corpora are usually in a compact form, which restricts the generalization ability of models. To this end, we collect a novel dataset AntCritic to serve as a helpful complement to this area, which consists of about 10k free-form and visually-rich financial comments and supports both argument component detection and argument relation prediction tasks. Besides, to cope with the challenges brought by scenario expansion, we thoroughly explore the fine-grained relation prediction and structure reconstruction scheme and discuss the encoding mechanism for visual styles and layouts. On this basis, we design two simple but effective model architectures and conduct various experiments on this dataset to provide benchmark performances as a reference and verify the practicability of our proposed architecture. We release our data and code in this link, and this dataset follows CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

We are interested in a challenging task, Realistic-Music-Score based Singing Voice Synthesis (RMS-SVS). RMS-SVS aims to generate high-quality singing voices given realistic music scores with different note types (grace, slur, rest, etc.). Though significant progress has been achieved, recent singing voice synthesis (SVS) methods are limited to fine-grained music scores, which require a complicated data collection pipeline with time-consuming manual annotation to align music notes with phonemes. % Furthermore, existing approaches cannot synthesize rhythmic singing voices given realistic music scores due to the domain gap between fine-grained music scores and realistic music scores. Furthermore, these manual annotation destroys the regularity of note durations in music scores, making fine-grained music scores inconvenient for composing. To tackle these challenges, we propose RMSSinger, the first RMS-SVS method, which takes realistic music scores as input, eliminating most of the tedious manual annotation and avoiding the aforementioned inconvenience. Note that music scores are based on words rather than phonemes, in RMSSinger, we introduce word-level modeling to avoid the time-consuming phoneme duration annotation and the complicated phoneme-level mel-note alignment. Furthermore, we propose the first diffusion-based pitch modeling method, which ameliorates the naturalness of existing pitch-modeling methods. To achieve these, we collect a new dataset containing realistic music scores and singing voices according to these realistic music scores from professional singers. Extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Audio samples are available at https://rmssinger.github.io/.

Text-to-speech(TTS) has undergone remarkable improvements in performance, particularly with the advent of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). However, the perceived quality of audio depends not solely on its content, pitch, rhythm, and energy, but also on the physical environment.In this work, we propose ViT-TTS, the first visual TTS model with scalable diffusion transformers. ViT-TTS complement the phoneme sequence with the visual information to generate high-perceived audio, opening up new avenues for practical applications of AR and VR to allow a more immersive and realistic audio experience. To mitigate the data scarcity in learning visual acoustic information, we 1) introduce a self-supervised learning framework to enhance both the visual-text encoder and denoiser decoder; 2) leverage the diffusion transformer scalable in terms of parameters and capacity to learn visual scene information. Experimental results demonstrate that ViT-TTS achieves new state-of-the-art results, outperforming cascaded systems and other baselines regardless of the visibility of the scene. With low-resource data (1h, 2h, 5h), ViT-TTS achieves comparative results with rich-resource baselines.

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) aims to convert speech from one language into another, and has demonstrated significant progress to date. Despite the recent success, current S2ST models still suffer from distinct degradation in noisy environments and fail to translate visual speech (i.e., the movement of lips and teeth). In this work, we present AV-TranSpeech, the first audio-visual speech-to-speech (AV-S2ST) translation model without relying on intermediate text. AV-TranSpeech complements the audio stream with visual information to promote system robustness and opens up a host of practical applications: dictation or dubbing archival films. To mitigate the data scarcity with limited parallel AV-S2ST data, we 1) explore self-supervised pre-training with unlabeled audio-visual data to learn contextual representation, and 2) introduce cross-modal distillation with S2ST models trained on the audio-only corpus to further reduce the requirements of visual data. Experimental results on two language pairs demonstrate that AV-TranSpeech outperforms audio-only models under all settings regardless of the type of noise. With low-resource audio-visual data (10h, 30h), cross-modal distillation yields an improvement of 7.6 BLEU on average compared with baselines. Audio samples are available at https://AV-TranSpeech.github.io/.