Mining linguistic tone patterns with symbolic representation

This paper conceptualizes speech prosody data mining and its potential application in data-driven phonology/phonetics research. We first conceptualize Speech Prosody Mining (SPM) in a time-series data mining framework. Specifically, we propose using efficient symbolic representations for speech prosody time-series similarity computation. We experiment with both symbolic and numeric representations and distance measures in a series of time-series classification and clustering experiments on a dataset of Mandarin tones. Evaluation results show that symbolic representation performs comparably with other representations at a reduced cost, which enables us to efficiently mine large speech prosody corpora while opening up to possibilities of using a wide range of algorithms that require discrete valued data. We discuss the potential of SPM using time-series mining techniques in future works.