A preliminary exploration on tone error detection in Mandarin based on clustering

Author

Zhu, Taotao ; Ke, Dengfeng ; Chen, Zhenbiao ; Xu, Bo

Author_Institution

Digital Content Technol. Res. Center, Chinese Acad. of Sci., Beijing, China

fYear

2010

Firstpage

48

Lastpage

51

Abstract

This paper addresses the ongoing issue of tone error detection for Mandarin Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems. A novel approach based on clustering is proposed. The selection of different contextual tonal factors including Uni-tone, LBi-tone and RBi-tone are explored. Experimental results show that our proposed approach is feasible, obtaining an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 18.75% by LBi-tone and with a 2.35% reduction compared to Uni-tone on a real corpus of nonnative speaker of Mandarin. Additionally, effects of contextual tonal factors on disyllabic words are investigated in this work.

Keywords

computer aided instruction; natural language processing; pattern clustering; LBi-tone; Mandarin; Mandarin computer assisted language learning systems; RBi-tone; Uni-tone; clustering; disyllabic words; tone error detection; Clustering algorithms; Context; Databases; Feature extraction; Hidden Markov models; Speech; Testing; CALL; F0; clustering; tone error detection;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Universal Communication Symposium (IUCS), 2010 4th International

Conference_Location

Beijing

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-7821-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IUCS.2010.5666769

Filename

5666769