  This paper proposes a forward attention method for the sequenceto- sequence
acoustic modeling of speech synthesis. This method is motivated by the nature
of the monotonic alignment from phone sequences to acoustic sequences. Only the
alignment paths that satisfy the monotonic condition are taken into
consideration at each decoder timestep. The modified attention probabilities at
each timestep are computed recursively using a forward algorithm. A transition
agent for forward attention is further proposed, which helps the attention
mechanism to make decisions whether to move forward or stay at each decoder
timestep. Experimental results show that the proposed forward attention method
achieves faster convergence speed and higher stability than the baseline
attention method. Besides, the method of forward attention with transition
agent can also help improve the naturalness of synthetic speech and control the
speed of synthetic speech effectively.
