Automatic analysis of the intonation of a tone language. Applying the Momel algorithm to spontaneous Standard Chinese (Beijing)

This paper describes the application of the Momel algorithm to a corpus of spontaneous speech in Standard (Beijing) Chinese. A selection of utterances by four speakers was analysed automatically and the resynthesised utterances were evaluated subjectively with two categories of errors: lexical tone errors and intonation errors. The target points determining the pitch contours of the synthetic utterances were then corrected manually in order to obtain a set of acceptable utterances for the entire corpus. An application attempting to optimise window- size for the Momel algorithm showed no overall improvement with respect to the manually corrected data. This annotated data will nevertheless constitute a useful yardstick for evaluating im- provements to the automatic algorithm which is expected to be far more robust than data annotated for languages with no lexical tone.