Objective Evaluation of the Neutral Tone in Putonghua Proficiency Testing

Author

Lin, Tang ; Jun-Xun, Yin

Author_Institution

Coll. of Electron. & Inf. Eng., South China Univ. of Technol., Guangzhou

Volume

1

fYear

2006

fDate

14-19 May 2006

Abstract

Correct pronunciation of the neutral tone (TO) is an important factor in assessing Putonghua (PTH) proficiency levels. The T0 objective evaluation system is an important subsystem of the Putonghua proficiency test (PPT) objective evaluation system. After analyzing the T0 features, this paper presents a pitch normalizing algorithm which reflects auditory sensitivity. Seven features are selected as evaluation parameters. Using the Gaussian mixture models (GMM) or the multi layer perceptron (MLP) Models, data drawn from 43 individuals´ utterances is tested. The accuracy of the objective evaluations described above is 89% identical to that usually achieved in subjective evaluation

Keywords

Gaussian processes; multilayer perceptrons; natural languages; Gaussian mixture models; Putonghua proficiency testing; T0 objective evaluation system; auditory sensitivity; multilayer perceptron; neutral tone; pitch normalizing algorithm; Algorithm design and analysis; Assembly; Dictionaries; Educational institutions; Information technology; Natural languages; Speech recognition; Statistics; System testing; Vocabulary;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2006. ICASSP 2006 Proceedings. 2006 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Toulouse

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0469-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.2006.1660210

Filename

1660210