Anchoring hypothesis and its application to tone recognition of Chinese continuous speech

Abstract

We present in this paper a new Chinese lexical tone recognition approach based on our pitch anchoring hypothesis, which suggests that the tone offset of the preceding lexical tone and the tone onset of the succeeding lexical tone serve as anchor points for the pitch heights of the onset and offset of the sandwiched lexical tone. The new approach exploits relative F0 heights between neighboring tones as important discriminating features for the lexical tones. Experimental results revealed that the new approach could increase the tone recognition accuracy greatly: above 10% (from 75.3% to 85.5%) compared with the conventional one.