Due to the interaction between lexical tones and intonation in Chinese speech melody, the contour patterns of Chinese IPs （intonational phrases） have long been an intriguing yet complicated subject. Within the AM （...Due to the interaction between lexical tones and intonation in Chinese speech melody, the contour patterns of Chinese IPs （intonational phrases） have long been an intriguing yet complicated subject. Within the AM （Autosegmental-Metrical） framework, this paper makes an empirical study on the subject based on a small-scale database of 22 standard Chinese news stories. A five-degree D value system is proposed for data normalization so that various contour patterns of IPs can be identified and compared despite complications in pitch register and pitch range. The major findings are： Chinese IPs mainly comprise 2, 3, or 4 ips （intermediate phrases）. And the contour patterns of Chinese IPs suggest that the statement intonation in Chinese is primarily indicated by the near-bottom Dmin value of the last ip. Meanwhile, when the primary indicator is not typical, the falling trend of the last part of the top-line can serve as a compensatory perceptual clue.展开更多
Automatic prosodic break detection and annotation are important for both speech understanding and natural speech synthesis. In this paper, we discuss automatic prosodic break detection and feature analysis. The contri...Automatic prosodic break detection and annotation are important for both speech understanding and natural speech synthesis. In this paper, we discuss automatic prosodic break detection and feature analysis. The contributions of the paper are two aspects. One is that we use classifier combination method to detect Mandarin and English prosodic break using acoustic, lexical and syntactic evidence. Our proposed method achieves better performance on both the Mandarin prosodic annotation corpus Annotated Speech Corpus of Chinese Discourse and the English prosodic annotation corpus -- Boston University Radio News Corpus when compared with the baseline system and other researches＇ experimental results. The other is the feature analysis for prosodic break detection. The functions of different features, such as duration, pitch, energy, and intensity, are analyzed and compared in Mandarin and English prosodic break detection. Based on the feature analysis, we also verify some linguistic conclusions.展开更多
文摘Due to the interaction between lexical tones and intonation in Chinese speech melody, the contour patterns of Chinese IPs （intonational phrases） have long been an intriguing yet complicated subject. Within the AM （Autosegmental-Metrical） framework, this paper makes an empirical study on the subject based on a small-scale database of 22 standard Chinese news stories. A five-degree D value system is proposed for data normalization so that various contour patterns of IPs can be identified and compared despite complications in pitch register and pitch range. The major findings are： Chinese IPs mainly comprise 2, 3, or 4 ips （intermediate phrases）. And the contour patterns of Chinese IPs suggest that the statement intonation in Chinese is primarily indicated by the near-bottom Dmin value of the last ip. Meanwhile, when the primary indicator is not typical, the falling trend of the last part of the top-line can serve as a compensatory perceptual clue.
基金Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 90820303,90820011the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province of China under Grant No. ZR2011FQ024
文摘Automatic prosodic break detection and annotation are important for both speech understanding and natural speech synthesis. In this paper, we discuss automatic prosodic break detection and feature analysis. The contributions of the paper are two aspects. One is that we use classifier combination method to detect Mandarin and English prosodic break using acoustic, lexical and syntactic evidence. Our proposed method achieves better performance on both the Mandarin prosodic annotation corpus Annotated Speech Corpus of Chinese Discourse and the English prosodic annotation corpus -- Boston University Radio News Corpus when compared with the baseline system and other researches＇ experimental results. The other is the feature analysis for prosodic break detection. The functions of different features, such as duration, pitch, energy, and intensity, are analyzed and compared in Mandarin and English prosodic break detection. Based on the feature analysis, we also verify some linguistic conclusions.
