Informatica

Intonation is a complex suprasegmental phenomenon essential for speech processing. However, it is still largely understudied, especially in the case of under-resourced languages, such as Lithuanian. The current paper focuses on intonation in Lithuanian, a Baltic pitch-accent language with free stress and tonal variations on accented heavy syllables. Due to historical circumstances, the description and analysis of Lithuanian intonation were carried out within different theoretical frameworks and in several languages, which makes them hardly accessible to the international research community. This paper is the first attempt to gather research on Lithuanian intonation from both the Lithuanian and the Western traditions, the structuralist and generativist points of view, and the linguistic and modelling perspectives. The paper identifies issues in existing research that require special attention and proposes directions for future investigations both in linguistics and modelling.

This paper presents the corpus-driven approach in building the computational model of fundamental frequency, or ${\mathit{F}}_0$, for Lithuanian language. The model was obtained by training the HMM-based speech synthesis system HTS on six hours of speech coming from multiple speakers. Several gender specific models, using different parameters and different contextual factors, were investigated. The models were evaluated by synthesizing ${\mathit{F}}_0$ contours and by comparing them to the original ${\mathit{F}}_0$ contours using criteria of root mean square error (RMSE) and voicing classification error. The HMM-based models showed an improvement of the RMSE over the mean-based model that predicted ${\mathit{F}}_0$ of the vowel on the basis of its average normalized pitch.