Development and Evaluation of Online Infrastructure to Aid Teaching and Learning of Japanese Prosody

Nobuaki MINEMATSU; Ibuki NAKAMURA; Masayuki SUZUKI; Hiroko HIRANO; Chieko NAKAGAWA; Noriko NAKAMURA; Yukinori TAGAWA; Keikichi HIROSE; Hiroya HASHIMOTO

doi:10.1587/transinf.2016AWI0007

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Development and Evaluation of Online Infrastructure to Aid Teaching and Learning of Japanese Prosody

Nobuaki MINEMATSU, Ibuki NAKAMURA, Masayuki SUZUKI, Hiroko HIRANO, Chieko NAKAGAWA, Noriko NAKAMURA, Yukinori TAGAWA, Keikichi HIROSE, Hiroya HASHIMOTO

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Summary :

This paper develops an online and freely available framework to aid teaching and learning the prosodic control of Tokyo Japanese: how to generate its adequate word accent and phrase intonation. This framework is called OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1] and it provides three features. 1) Visual, auditory, systematic, and comprehensive illustration of patterns of accent change (accent sandhi) of verbs and adjectives. Here only the changes caused by twelve fundamental conjugations are focused upon. 2) Visual illustration of the accent pattern of a given verbal expression, which is a combination of a verb and its postpositional auxiliary words. 3) Visual illustration of the pitch pattern of any given sentence and the expected positions of accent nuclei in the sentence. The third feature is technically implemented by using an accent change prediction module that we developed for Japanese Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis [2],[3]. Experiments show that accent nucleus assignment to given texts by the proposed framework is much more accurate than that by native speakers. Subjective assessment and objective assessment done by teachers and learners show extremely high pedagogical effectiveness of the developed framework.

Publication: IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information Vol.E100-D No.4 pp.662-669

Publication Date: 2017/04/01

Publicized: 2016/12/22

Online ISSN: 1745-1361

DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2016AWI0007

Type of Manuscript: Special Section INVITED PAPER (Special Section on Award-winning Papers)

Category

Authors

Nobuaki MINEMATSU
  The University of Tokyo
Ibuki NAKAMURA
  Fujitsu Limited
Masayuki SUZUKI
  IBM Research
Hiroko HIRANO
  Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Chieko NAKAGAWA
  Waseda University
Noriko NAKAMURA
  Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Yukinori TAGAWA
  Nihon University
Keikichi HIROSE
  The University of Tokyo
Hiroya HASHIMOTO
  The University of Tokyo

Keyword

speech training in Japanese, word accent, intonation, speech synthesis, accent prediction, assessment

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Nobuaki MINEMATSU, Ibuki NAKAMURA, Masayuki SUZUKI, Hiroko HIRANO, Chieko NAKAGAWA, Noriko NAKAMURA, Yukinori TAGAWA, Keikichi HIROSE, Hiroya HASHIMOTO, "Development and Evaluation of Online Infrastructure to Aid Teaching and Learning of Japanese Prosody" in IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information, vol. E100-D, no. 4, pp. 662-669, April 2017, doi: 10.1587/transinf.2016AWI0007.
Abstract: This paper develops an online and freely available framework to aid teaching and learning the prosodic control of Tokyo Japanese: how to generate its adequate word accent and phrase intonation. This framework is called OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1] and it provides three features. 1) Visual, auditory, systematic, and comprehensive illustration of patterns of accent change (accent sandhi) of verbs and adjectives. Here only the changes caused by twelve fundamental conjugations are focused upon. 2) Visual illustration of the accent pattern of a given verbal expression, which is a combination of a verb and its postpositional auxiliary words. 3) Visual illustration of the pitch pattern of any given sentence and the expected positions of accent nuclei in the sentence. The third feature is technically implemented by using an accent change prediction module that we developed for Japanese Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis [2],[3]. Experiments show that accent nucleus assignment to given texts by the proposed framework is much more accurate than that by native speakers. Subjective assessment and objective assessment done by teachers and learners show extremely high pedagogical effectiveness of the developed framework.
URL: https://global.ieice.org/en_transactions/information/10.1587/transinf.2016AWI0007/_p

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@ARTICLE{e100-d_4_662,
author={Nobuaki MINEMATSU, Ibuki NAKAMURA, Masayuki SUZUKI, Hiroko HIRANO, Chieko NAKAGAWA, Noriko NAKAMURA, Yukinori TAGAWA, Keikichi HIROSE, Hiroya HASHIMOTO, },
journal={IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information},
title={Development and Evaluation of Online Infrastructure to Aid Teaching and Learning of Japanese Prosody},
year={2017},
volume={E100-D},
number={4},
pages={662-669},
abstract={This paper develops an online and freely available framework to aid teaching and learning the prosodic control of Tokyo Japanese: how to generate its adequate word accent and phrase intonation. This framework is called OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1] and it provides three features. 1) Visual, auditory, systematic, and comprehensive illustration of patterns of accent change (accent sandhi) of verbs and adjectives. Here only the changes caused by twelve fundamental conjugations are focused upon. 2) Visual illustration of the accent pattern of a given verbal expression, which is a combination of a verb and its postpositional auxiliary words. 3) Visual illustration of the pitch pattern of any given sentence and the expected positions of accent nuclei in the sentence. The third feature is technically implemented by using an accent change prediction module that we developed for Japanese Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis [2],[3]. Experiments show that accent nucleus assignment to given texts by the proposed framework is much more accurate than that by native speakers. Subjective assessment and objective assessment done by teachers and learners show extremely high pedagogical effectiveness of the developed framework.},
keywords={},
doi={10.1587/transinf.2016AWI0007},
ISSN={1745-1361},
month={April},}

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TY - JOUR
TI - Development and Evaluation of Online Infrastructure to Aid Teaching and Learning of Japanese Prosody
T2 - IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information
SP - 662
EP - 669
AU - Nobuaki MINEMATSU
AU - Ibuki NAKAMURA
AU - Masayuki SUZUKI
AU - Hiroko HIRANO
AU - Chieko NAKAGAWA
AU - Noriko NAKAMURA
AU - Yukinori TAGAWA
AU - Keikichi HIROSE
AU - Hiroya HASHIMOTO
PY - 2017
DO - 10.1587/transinf.2016AWI0007
JO - IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information
SN - 1745-1361
VL - E100-D
IS - 4
JA - IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information
Y1 - April 2017
AB - This paper develops an online and freely available framework to aid teaching and learning the prosodic control of Tokyo Japanese: how to generate its adequate word accent and phrase intonation. This framework is called OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1] and it provides three features. 1) Visual, auditory, systematic, and comprehensive illustration of patterns of accent change (accent sandhi) of verbs and adjectives. Here only the changes caused by twelve fundamental conjugations are focused upon. 2) Visual illustration of the accent pattern of a given verbal expression, which is a combination of a verb and its postpositional auxiliary words. 3) Visual illustration of the pitch pattern of any given sentence and the expected positions of accent nuclei in the sentence. The third feature is technically implemented by using an accent change prediction module that we developed for Japanese Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis [2],[3]. Experiments show that accent nucleus assignment to given texts by the proposed framework is much more accurate than that by native speakers. Subjective assessment and objective assessment done by teachers and learners show extremely high pedagogical effectiveness of the developed framework.
ER -