TY - GEN
T1 - Applying functional partition in the investigation of lexical tonal-pattern categories in an under-resourced Chinese dialect
AU - Wu, Junru
AU - Chen, Yiya
AU - van Heuven, Vincent J.
AU - Schiller, Niels O.
N1 - Publication details (e.g. title, author(s), publication statuses and dates) are captured on an “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE” basis at the time of record harvesting from the data source. Suggestions for further amendments or supplementary information can be sent to [email protected].
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - The present study applied functional partition to investigate disyllabic lexical tonal-pattern categories in an under-resourced Chinese dialect, Jinan Mandarin. A Two-Stage partitioning procedure was introduced to process a multi-speaker corpus that contains irregular lexical variants in a semi-automatic way. In the first stage, a program provides suggestions for the phonetician to decide the lexical tonal variants for the recordings of each word, based on the result of a functional k-means partitioning algorithm and tonal information from an available pronunciation dictionary of a related Chinese dialect, i.e. Standard Chinese. The second stage iterates a functional version of k-means partitioning with Silhouette-based criteria to abstract an optimal number of tonal patterns from the whole corpus, which also allows the phoneticians to adjust the results of the automatic procedure in a controlled way and so redo partitioning for a subset of clusters. The procedure yielded eleven disyllabic tonal patterns for Jinan Mandarin, representing the tonal system used by contemporary Jinan Mandarin speakers from a wide range of age groups. The procedure used in this paper is different from previous linguistic descriptions, which were based on more elderly speakers’ pronunciations. This method incorporates phoneticians’ linguistic knowledge and preliminary linguistic resources into the procedure of partitioning. It can improve the efficiency and objectivity in the investigation of lexical tonal-pattern categories when building pronunciation dictionaries for under-resourced languages. © 2018, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
AB - The present study applied functional partition to investigate disyllabic lexical tonal-pattern categories in an under-resourced Chinese dialect, Jinan Mandarin. A Two-Stage partitioning procedure was introduced to process a multi-speaker corpus that contains irregular lexical variants in a semi-automatic way. In the first stage, a program provides suggestions for the phonetician to decide the lexical tonal variants for the recordings of each word, based on the result of a functional k-means partitioning algorithm and tonal information from an available pronunciation dictionary of a related Chinese dialect, i.e. Standard Chinese. The second stage iterates a functional version of k-means partitioning with Silhouette-based criteria to abstract an optimal number of tonal patterns from the whole corpus, which also allows the phoneticians to adjust the results of the automatic procedure in a controlled way and so redo partitioning for a subset of clusters. The procedure yielded eleven disyllabic tonal patterns for Jinan Mandarin, representing the tonal system used by contemporary Jinan Mandarin speakers from a wide range of age groups. The procedure used in this paper is different from previous linguistic descriptions, which were based on more elderly speakers’ pronunciations. This method incorporates phoneticians’ linguistic knowledge and preliminary linguistic resources into the procedure of partitioning. It can improve the efficiency and objectivity in the investigation of lexical tonal-pattern categories when building pronunciation dictionaries for under-resourced languages. © 2018, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
KW - K-means partition
KW - Pattern recognition
KW - Phonetics
KW - Pronunciation dictionary
KW - Tone
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U2 - 10.1007/978-981-10-8111-8_3
DO - 10.1007/978-981-10-8111-8_3
M3 - RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)
SN - 9789811081101
VL - 807
T3 - Communications in Computer and Information Science
SP - 24
EP - 35
BT - Man-Machine Speech Communication - 14th National Conference, NCMMSC 2017, Revised Selected Papers
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 14th National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communication, NCMMSC 2017
Y2 - 11 October 2017 through 13 October 2017
ER -