Automated Mandarin tone classification using deep neural networks trained on a large speech dataset
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A tonal language is one in which the speaker’s intonation modifies the meaning of a word. In this work, we perform a rigorous analysis of intonation changes, or pitch contours, produced by native Mandarin speakers to predict the tone-contour type. Pitch contours are estimated using a number of different methods, also measuring each contour’s Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). The dataset used was autonomously generated from the Aishell open-source Mandarin speech corpus. Each sample was aligned with its transcript using Montreal Forced Alignment and segmented into individual words. The resulting corpus covers 11 topic domains, spoken by 400 individuals. Separate development, training, and testing datasets are created to ensure the integrity of our results. Pitch contours and their MFCCs are exposed to a number of machine learning techniques including clustered, regression, and traditional Deep Neural Network (DNN) approaches. MFCCs are additionally processed using convolutional neural networks. The models are used to predict the corresponding tone for a contour. Our work seeks to determine which intonation representations perform optimally for machine learning tasks. The tool is used to provide audio and visual feedback to learners of tonal languages. [Work supported by RPI Seed Grant and CISL].
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".