A method for automatic extraction of F0 contour generation process model parameters for Mandarin

The model of F₀ contour generation has been successfully applied to Mandarin, which is a typical tone language with a distinct feature that both positive and negative tone commands are required. In this paper, a method is proposed for automatic extraction of parameters of the F₀ contour model for Mandarin. With the same framework as that proposed for Japanese and English, the method presented here for Mandarin is focused on the first-order estimation of tone command parameters. In order to distinguish between positive and negative tone commands, the information on syllable timing and tone labels is employed, and a set of rules are constructed to recognize the tone command patterns within each syllable. A preliminary experiment indicates that the method works effectively and gives results comparable with those obtained by manual analysis.