Automatic analysis of the intonation of a tone language. applying the momel algorithm to spontaneous standard Chinese (beijing)

This paper describes the application of the Momel algorithm to a corpus of spontaneous speech in Standard (Beijing) Chinese. A selection of utterances by four speakers was analysed automatically and the resynthesised utterances were evaluated subjectively with two categories of errors: lexical tone errors and intonation errors. The target points determining the pitch contours of the synthetic utterances were then corrected manually in order to obtain a set of acceptable utterances for the entire corpus. An application attempting to optimise windowsize for the Momel algorithm showed no overall improvement with respect to the manually corrected data. This annotated data will nevertheless constitute a useful yardstick for evaluating improvements to the automatic algorithm which is expected to be far more robust than data annotated for languages with no lexical tone.