Mandarin Chinese tone nucleus detection with landmarks

This paper discusses a new approach to improve tone recognition by modeling the tone nucleus with vowel landmark detection. The tone nucleus region is identified based on vowel landmark frames derived by an automatic landmark recognition system. In the corresponding tone recognition experiments, the best results with landmark-based tone nucleus regions outperform the best baseline system results by more than 6%. Moreover, in an exploratory experiment, the tone recognition accuracy using tone nucleus regions based only on vowel landmark evidence shows less than 2% degradation relative to the accuracy obtained using both landmark frames and force-aligned vowel boundary information. These findings further demonstrate the potential to perform tone recognition based on landmark detection alone, without full speech recognition or aligned transcriptions.