On Representation of Fundamental Frequency of Speech for Prosody Analysis Using Reliability Function.

Abstract

This paper highlights on a method that provides a new prosodic feature called ‘F0 reliability field’ based on a reliability function of the fundamental frequency (F0). The proposed method does not employ any correction process for F0 estimation errors that occur during automatic F0 extraction. By applying this feature as a score function for prosodic analyses like prosodic structure estimation or superpositional modeling of prosodic commands, these prosodic information could be acquired with higher accuracy. The feature has been applied to ‘F0 template matching method’, which detects accent phrase boundaries in Japanese continuous speech. The experimental results show that compared to the conventional F0 contour, the proposed feature overcomes the harmful influence caused by F0 errors.