Tone recognition for Chinese speech: a comparative study of Mandarin and Cantonese

Abstract

The paper presents a comparative study on automatic continuous tone recognition for Mandarin and Cantonese. Compared with Mandarin, Cantonese has a much more complex tone system. The effects of F/sub 0/ normalization on the tone recognition of Mandarin and Cantonese are studied. Furthermore, the two tone systems are compared from an engineering point of view. Tone recognition accuracies of 71.50% and 83.06% have been obtained for Cantonese and Mandarin respectively. These results compare favorably with results reported for other tone recognition experiments on the same (for Cantonese) and similar (for Mandarin) databases.