Xuanyue Zhao
Author directory2026
NüshuVoice: Reviving the Voice of Endangered Nüshu with Pitch-Aware Text-to-Speech
Hongkun Yang | YI Xinhui | Zhao Xiyan | Yibo Meng | Lionel Z. Wang | Lixu Wang | Yaqi Zhang | Ruiqi Chen | Xuanyue Zhao | Lanxin Zhang | Yu Zeng | Chu Weijia | Yiming Ma | Chenyu Liu | Jianghao Lin | Xu Xin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
Hongkun Yang | YI Xinhui | Zhao Xiyan | Yibo Meng | Lionel Z. Wang | Lixu Wang | Yaqi Zhang | Ruiqi Chen | Xuanyue Zhao | Lanxin Zhang | Yu Zeng | Chu Weijia | Yiming Ma | Chenyu Liu | Jianghao Lin | Xu Xin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
Nüshu is an endangered phonetic script historically used by women in Jiangyong County, southern Hunan, China. While existing computational studies of Nüshu mainly focus on textual digitization and visual recognition, the acoustic reconstruction of its authentic pronunciation remains largely unexplored. Building a Nüshu text-to-speech (TTS) system is particularly challenging because available recordings are extremely limited and mostly consist of isolated syllable-level pronunciations rather than natural sentence-level utterances. In this work, we introduce NüshuVoice, the first TTS benchmark for Nüshu. We construct a sentence-level Nüshu text-to-audio dataset that aligns standardized Unicode Nüshu text, phonetic transcriptions, standard Chinese translations, and archival recordings. To synthesize speech under this extreme low-resource setting, we propose Nüshu-PitchVITS, an -conditioned VITS framework that leverages Nüshu’s five-level pitch notation as an explicit prosodic inductive bias. Experimental results show that Nüshu-PitchVITS outperforms strong TTS baselines in spectral fidelity, pitch reconstruction, and human-rated intelligibility. We publicly release the dataset and code at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Nvshu-TTS-2EB6.