Consistent Estimation of Fujisaki’s Intonation Model Parameters

This paper presents a novel method to estimate an intonation model based on the representation of the fundamental frequency contour proposed by Fujisaki. Unlike other methods, this approach does not find the commands sentence by sentence but it estimates the commands analysing simultaneously all the phrase and accent components in the corpus that belong to the same linguistic class. The classes are defined top-down using CART based on linguistic features derived from the text. This method avoids unvoiced interpolation, stylization and the separation of the high and low frequency of the f0 contours. All this preprocessing can produce ambiguities and noisy commands. Furthermore, the commands are very consistent because all the components of a given linguistic class are represented by the same command. Furthermore, for a given class definition, we present a closed formulation to derive the amplitudes of the commands assuming that the time instants are known. This can be used also in sentence-by-sentence analysis to speed up the extraction. 1