Automatic labeling of Japanese prosody using j-toBI style description

Speech corpora with prosodic labels are getting more and more important not only for speech synthesis but also for discourse modeling. A widely used labeling system for Japanese prosody, J-ToBI, however, is insufficient for applications like discourse modeling and it even lacks an accurate method for automatic labeling. In this paper, we propose an automatic labeling method for J-ToBI style description of tonal events in Japanese speech, aiming at applying it to a general-purpose labeling of Japanese prosody. The proposed method takes into account the linguistic constraints on the tone structure, which improves the accuracy of automatic labeling. We achieve a fairly good performance in a preliminary experiment using a read speech corpus.