CART-based modeling of Chinese tonal patterns with a functional model tracing the fundamental frequency trajectories

Jinfu Ni, Shinsuke Sakai, Tohru Shimizu, Satoshi Nakamura
2009 2009 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing  
We propose an approach to modeling Chinese tonal patterns, focusing on the basic fundamental frequency (F 0 ) patterns characterized by the contextual linguistic features that can be directly extracted from text. We analyze tonal patterns as sparse target points (tonal F 0 peaks and valleys) and represent them in parametric form within the framework of a functional F 0 model. The relationships between the target points and underlying linguistic features are trained using classification and
more » ... ssion tree analysis (CARTs), and this functional model is used to trace the F 0 trajectories when training the CARTs and to synthesize a tonal pattern from the target points predicted by the CARTs. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method has low F 0 prediction errors. Utilization of the F 0 ranges measured from training samples could significantly reduce the influences of differences in voice ranges on training a speaker-independent model. Furthermore, the most important roles in characterizing tonal patterns were played by a few linguistic features such as lexical tone context and the distinction between voiced from unvoiced initials.
doi:10.1109/icassp.2009.4960568 dblp:conf/icassp/NiSSN09 fatcat:fkv7ff4rwzerfinl6hzqdmb4nm