From English pitch accent detection to Mandarin stress detection, where is the difference?

Although English pitch accent detection has been studied extensively, there relatively a few works explore Mandarin stress detection. Moreover, the comparison and analysis between Mandarin stress detection and English pitch accent detection have not been touched for such counterpart tasks. In this paper, we discuss Mandarin stress detection and compare it with English pitch accent detection. The contributions of the paper are two aspects: one is that we use classifier combination method to detect Mandarin stress and English pitch accent by using acoustic, lexical and syntactic evidence. Our proposed method achieves better performance on both the Mandarin prosodic annotation corpus—ASCCD and the English prosodic annotation corpus—Boston University Radio News Corpus (BURNC) when compared with the baseline system. We also verify our proposed method on other prosodic annotation corpus and continuous speech corpus. The other is the feature analysis. Duration, pitch, energy and intensity features are compared for Mandarin stress detection and English pitch accent detection. Based on the analysis of prosodic annotation corpora, we also verify some linguistic conclusions.

► The classifier combination method, which is the combination of boosting classification and regression tree and conditional random fields, is employed to detect Mandarin stress and English pitch accent by using acoustic, lexical and syntactic evidence.
► The lexical and syntactic related features are important to both Mandarin stress detection and English pitch accent detection.
► The acoustic related features in English pitch accent detection provide higher discrimination than that in Mandarin stress detection.
► In Mandarin stress detection, the mutual information of most features, except very few, is lower than that in English pitch accent detection.
► The differences between Mandarin and English lead to the different Mandarin stress and English pitch accent representation.