Tone Recognition of Isolated Mandarin Syllables

Mandarin is tonal language. For Mandarin, tone identification is very important for speech recognition and pronunciation evaluation. Mandarin tone behavior varies greatly from speaker to speaker and it presents the greatest challenge to any speaker-independent tone recognition system. This paper presents a speaker normalizing algorithm which is designed to reduce this influence. Then a basic neural network tone recognizer using recognition features extracted from the processing syllable is introduced. The system employs an improved pitch detector and a powerful tone identification method. Finally, the experimental results show that the tone recognition system classifies four tones very well.