The DKU-JNU-EMA Electromagnetic Articulography Database on Mandarin and Chinese Dialects with Tandem Feature based Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion

This paper presents the acquisition of the Duke Kunshan University Jinan University Electromagnetic Articulography (DKU-JNU-EMA) database in terms of aligned acoustics and articulatory data on Mandarin and Chinese dialects. This database currently includes data from multiple individuals in Mandarin and three Chinese dialects, namely Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew. There are 2–7 native speakers for each language or dialect. Acoustic data is obtained by one headmounted close talk microphone while articulatory data is obtained by the NDI electromagnetic articulography wave research system. The DKU-JNU-EMA database is now in preparation for public release to help advance research in areas of acoustic-to-articulatory inversion, speech production, dialect recognition, and experimental phonetics. Along with the database, we propose an acoustic-to-articulatory inversion baseline using deep neural networks. Moreover, we show that by concatenating the dimension reduced phoneme posterior probability feature with MFCC features at the feature level as tandem feature, the inversion system performance is enhanced.