Objective evaluation of vowels of standard Chinese pronunciation based on formant pattern

A method used for objective evaluation of pronunciation of vowels in standard Chinese is presented.The formant patterns of vowels are selected as the main features and an improved evaluation algorithm based on Support Vector Machine is proposed.In this algorithm,two-level classification strategy is employed.A full-classification model and a sub-classification model are trained for each vowel.The pronunciation quality is evaluated based on the classifi- cation results of this two-level strategy with evaluation model of each vowel.The new evaluation method is compared with traditional methods such as HMM posterior probability scoring method and feature of Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients(MFCC),and the results show that the performance is effectively improved by the proposed method.The correlation of scores between human testers and machine has achieved 82%.