Tone recognition in continuous Cantonese speech using supratone models

This paper studies automatic tone recognition in continuous Cantonese speech. Cantonese is a major Chinese dialect that is known for being rich in tones. Tone information serves as a useful knowledge source for automatic speech recognition of Cantonese. Cantonese tone recognition is difficult because the tones have similar shapes of pitch contours. The tones are differentiated mainly by their relative pitch heights. In natural speech, the pitch level of a tone may shift up and down and the F0 ranges of different tones overlap with each other, making them acoustically indistinguishable within the domain of a syllable. Our study shows that the relative pitch heights are largely preserved between neighboring tones. A novel method of supratone modeling is proposed for Cantonese tone recognition. Each supratone model characterizes the F0 contour of two or three tones in succession. The tone sequence of a continuous utterance is formed as an overlapped concatenation of supratone units. The most likely tone sequence is determined under phonological constraints on syllable-tone combinations. The proposed method attains an accuracy of 74.68% in speaker-independent tone recognition experiments. In particular, the confusion among the tones with similar contour shapes is greatly resolved. (C) 2007 Acoustical Society of America.