Two new estimation methods for a superpositional intonation model

This work presents two new approaches for parameter estimation of the superpositional intonation model for German. These approaches introduce linguistic and paralinguistic assumptions allowing the initialization of a previous standard method. Additionally, all restrictions on the configuration of accents were eliminated. The proposed linguistic hypotheses can be based on either tonal or lexical accent, which gives rise to two different estimation methods. These two kind of hypotheses were validated by comparison of the estimation performance relative to two standard methods, one manual and one automatic. The results show that the proposed methods far exceed the performance of the automatic method and are slightly beyond the manual method of reference.