Effects of Word Embeddings on Neural Network-based Pitch Accent Detection

Abstract: Pitch accent detection often makes use of both acoustic and lexical features based on the fact that pitch accents tend to correlate with certain words. In this paper, we extend a pitch accent detector that involves a convolutional neural network to include word embeddings, which are state-of-the-art vector representations of words. We examine the effect these features have on within-corpus and cross-corpus experiments on three English datasets. The results show that while word embeddings can improve the performance in corpus-dependent experiments, they also have the potential to make generalization to unseen data more challenging.