Representation Learning for Discovering Phonemic Tone Contours
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 the same phonemic tone. Our method extracts the pitch for each syllable, then trains a convolutional autoencoder to learn a low dimensional representation for each contour. We then apply the mean shift algorithm to cluster tones in high-density regions of the latent space. Furthermore, by feeding the centers of each cluster into the decoder, we produce a prototypical contour that represents each cluster. We apply this method to spoken multi-syllable words in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese and evaluate how closely our clusters match the ground truth tone categories. Finally, we discuss some difficulties with our approach, including contextual tone variation and allophony effects.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
DecoderRepresentation LearningMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
A corpus-based investigation of pitch contours of monosyllabic words in conversational Taiwan Mandarin
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…
Prosodic ABX: A Language-Agnostic Method for Measuring Prosodic Contrast in Speech Representations
Speech representations from self-supervised speech models (S3Ms) are known to be sensitive to phonemic contrasts, but their sensitivity to prosodic contrasts has not been directly measured. The ABX discrimination task ha…
Form and meaning co-determine the realization of tone in Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous speech: the case of Tone 3 sandhi
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 …
FormWords.hk: A Comprehensive Cantonese Dictionary Dataset with Definitions, Translations and Transliterated Examples
This paper discusses the compilation of the words.hk Cantonese dictionary dataset, which was compiled through manual annotation over a period of 7 years. Cantonese is a low-resource language with limited tagged or manual…
SegmentationTransliterationGenerating Mandarin and Cantonese F0 Contours with Decision Trees and BLSTMs
This paper models the fundamental frequency contours on both Mandarin and Cantonese speech with decision trees and DNNs (deep neural networks). Different kinds of f0 representations and model architectures are tested for…