This paper highlights on a method that provides a new
prosodic feature called ‘F0 reliability field’ based on a reliability
function of the fundamental frequency (F0). The
proposed method does not employ any correction process
for F0 estimation errors that occur during automatic F0
extraction. By applying this feature as a score function
for prosodic analyses like prosodic structure estimation
or superpositional modeling of prosodic commands, these
prosodic information could be acquired with higher accuracy.
The feature has been applied to ‘F0 template matching
method’, which detects accent phrase boundaries in
Japanese continuous speech. The experimental results
show that compared to the conventional F0 contour, the
proposed feature overcomes the harmful influence caused
by F0 errors