Exploration of high-level prosodic patterns for continuous mandarin speech

In this paper, the high-level prosodic patterns of prosodic word (PW), prosodic phrase (PPh) and breath group/prosodic phrase group (BQ/PQ) for syllable pitch-level and duration are explored using an automatic joint prosody labeling and modeling method. Experimental results on a treebank speech corpus showed that the explored high-level prosodic patterns not only matched well with our a priori knowledge about Mandarin prosody, but also conformed well to other previous studies. They can therefore be integrated to form a meaningful Mandarin prosody hierarchy.