Related papers: Data mining Mandarin tone contour shapes
Tone is a prosodic feature used to distinguish words in many languages, some of which are endangered and scarcely documented. In this work, we use unsupervised representation learning to identify probable clusters of syllables that share…
In Mandarin, the tonal contours of monosyllabic words produced in isolation or in careful speech are characterized by four lexical tones: a high-level tone (T1), a rising tone (T2), a dipping tone (T3) and a falling tone (T4). However, in…
The pitch contours of Mandarin two-character words are generally understood as being shaped by the underlying tones of the constituent single-character words, in interaction with articulatory constraints imposed by factors such as speech…
This paper outlines the methodology for modeling tonal learning in fully unsupervised models of human language acquisition. Tonal patterns are among the computationally most complex learning objectives in language. We argue that a realistic…
Mandarin Chinese is characterized by being a tonal language; the pitch (or $F_0$) of its utterances carries considerable linguistic information. However, speech samples from different individuals are subject to changes in amplitude and…
Verbal communication transmits information across diverse linguistic levels, with neural synchronization (NS) between speakers and listeners emerging as a putative mechanism underlying successful exchange. However, the specific speech…
We present a corpus-based investigation of how the pitch contours of monosyllabic words are realized in spontaneous conversational Mandarin, focusing on the effects of words' meanings. We used the generalized additive model to decompose a…
A growing body of literature has demonstrated that semantics can co-determine fine phonetic detail. However, the complex interplay between phonetic realization and semantics remains understudied, particularly in pitch realization. The…
In Standard Chinese, Tone 3 (the dipping tone) becomes Tone 2 (rising tone) when followed by another Tone 3. Previous studies have noted that this sandhi process may be incomplete, in the sense that the assimilated Tone 3 is still distinct…
Interpretability research has shown that self-supervised Spoken Language Models (SLMs) encode a wide variety of features in human speech from the acoustic, phonetic, phonological, syntactic and semantic levels, to speaker characteristics.…
The proliferation of news media available online simultaneously presents a valuable resource and significant challenge to analysts aiming to profile and understand social and cultural trends in a geographic location of interest. While an…
This study investigates whether phonological features can be applied in text-to-speech systems to generate native and non-native speech in English and Mandarin. We present a mapping of ARPABET/pinyin to SAMPA/SAMPA-SC and then to…
How to describe the shape of a melodic phrase? Scholars have often relied on typologies with a small set of contour types. We question their adequacy: we find no evidence that phrase contours cluster into discrete types, neither in German…
Previous works on expressive speech synthesis mainly focus on current sentence. The context in adjacent sentences is neglected, resulting in inflexible speaking style for the same text, which lacks speech variations. In this paper, we…
Previous works on expressive speech synthesis focus on modelling the mono-scale style embedding from the current sentence or context, but the multi-scale nature of speaking style in human speech is neglected. In this paper, we propose a…
Conversational tones -- the manners and attitudes in which speakers communicate -- are essential to effective communication. Amidst the increasing popularization of Large Language Models (LLMs) over recent years, it becomes necessary to…
Representing speech as discretized units has numerous benefits in supporting downstream spoken language processing tasks. However, the approach has been less explored in speech synthesis of tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese. Our…
The study explored a new technique of phonetic tone training, which may have a positive impact on second language learning and tone training.
This study reports our efforts to improve automatic recognition of suprasegmentals by fine-tuning wav2vec 2.0 with CTC, a method that has been successful in automatic speech recognition. We demonstrate that the method can improve the…
Discrete speech units (DSUs) are derived by quantising representations from models trained using self-supervised learning (SSL). They are a popular representation for a wide variety of spoken language tasks, including those where prosody…