Learning Mizo Tones from F0 Contours Using 1D-CNN

This work attempts to build an automatic 1D-CNN based tone recognizer of Mizo, an under-studied Tibeto-Burman language of North-East India. Preliminary research findings have confirmed that along with four canonical tones of Mizo (High, Low, Rising and Falling), a phenomenon of Rising tone sandhi (RTS) with distinct phonetic characteristics are also observed. As per the authors’ knowledge, no work has been reported to identify the RTS along with four distinct tones. Moreover, previous tone recognition works have explored hand-crafted features derived from F0 contour which may not provide the explicit representation of a specific tone category. To address these issues, current work attempts to incorporate the RTS along with four lexical tones and learn tone specific features directly from F0 contours using a 1D-CNN model. Experimental results conducted for speaker independent case show that the proposed 1D-CNN model achieves an accuracy of 68.18%.