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Beyond Naturalness: Probing Automated Text-To-Speech Evaluators on Linguistically Grounded Dimensions

2026-08-10 · arXiv: 2608.09930

One-line summary

An AI research paper on Beyond Naturalness: Probing Automated Text-To-Speech Evaluators on Linguistically Grounded Dimensions.

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

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Original abstract

Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio Large Language Models (Audio-LLM) judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive. We deconstruct "naturalness" into a linguistically grounded annotation schema spanning 10 distinct perceptual dimensions, and use it to construct the first dimension-level meta-evaluation benchmark for TTS, comprising 860 utterances annotated by trained linguist raters. Results from benchmarking four MOS predictors and four Audio-LLM judges reveal that MOS predictors collapse onto acoustic signal quality, while Audio-LLM judges show selective, prompt-dependent detection that does not generalise across all dimensions. Neither class reliably captures a breadth of linguistically structured speech errors. Our dataset, annotation schema, and evaluation code are publicly released to support more targeted and interpretable TTS evaluation.

5.0Engineering value
7.0Research novelty
4.0Business relevance

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