1 research outputs found
Automatic analysis of the intonation of a tone language. Applying the Momel algorithm to spontaneous Standard Chinese (Beijing)
This paper describes the application of the Momel algorithm
to a corpus of spontaneous speech in Standard (Beijing) Chinese. A selection of utterances by four speakers was analysed
automatically and the resynthesised utterances were evaluated
subjectively with two categories of errors: lexical tone errors
and intonation errors. The target points determining the pitch
contours of the synthetic utterances were then corrected manually in order to obtain a set of acceptable utterances for the
entire corpus. An application attempting to optimise window-
size for the Momel algorithm showed no overall improvement
with respect to the manually corrected data. This annotated data
will nevertheless constitute a useful yardstick for evaluating im-
provements to the automatic algorithm which is expected to be
far more robust than data annotated for languages with no lexical tone