# Automated Tone Transcription and Clustering with Tone2Vec

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02324 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02324/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [A Transformer-based Framework for Multivariate Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02803/) (2020)
- [AISHELL-1: An Open-Source Mandarin Speech Corpus and A Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05522/) (2017)
- [graph2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05005/) (2017)
- [Emotion Recognition from Speech Using Wav2vec 2.0 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03502/) (2021)
- [Quantifying Language Variation Acoustically with Few Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02694/) (2022)
- [Automatic recognition of suprasegmentals in speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01122/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Unsupervised Learning and Representation of Mandarin Tonal Categories by a Generative CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17859/) (2025)
- [ToneCL: Contrastive Learning for Few-Shot Syllable-Level Tone Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24903/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lexical tones play a crucial role in Sino-Tibetan languages. However, current phonetic fieldwork relies on manual effort, resulting in substantial time and financial costs. This is especially challenging for the numerous endangered languages that are rapidly disappearing, often compounded by limited funding. In this paper, we introduce pitch-based similarity representations for tone transcription, named Tone2Vec. Experiments on dialect clustering and variance show that Tone2Vec effectively captures fine-grained tone variation. Utilizing Tone2Vec, we develop the first automatic approach for tone transcription and clustering by presenting a novel representation transformation for transcriptions. Additionally, these algorithms are systematically integrated into an open-sourced and easy-to-use package, ToneLab, which facilitates automated fieldwork and cross-regional, cross-lexical analysis for tonal languages. Extensive experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.