Automatic Extraction of Tone Command Parameters for the Model of F_0 Contour Generation for Standard Chinese

摘要

The model for the process of F_0 contour generation, first proposed by Fujisaki and his coworkers, has been successfully applied to Standard Chinese, which is a typical tone language with a distinct feature that both positive and negative tone commands are required. However, the inverse problem, viz., automatic derivation of the model parameters from an observed F_0 contour of speech, cannot be solved analytically. Moreover, the extraction of model parameters for Standard Chinese is more difficult than for Japanese and English, because the polarity of tone commands cannot be inferred directly from the F_0 contour itself. In this paper, an efficient method is proposed to solve the problem by using information on syllable timing and tone labels. With the same framework as for the successive approximation method proposed for Japanese and English, the method presented here for Standard Chinese is focused on the first-order estimation of tone command parameters. A set of infra-syllable and inter-syllable rules are constructed to recognize the tone command patterns within each syllable. The experiment shows that the method works effectively and gives results comparable to those obtained by manual analysis.