# Using embeddings to predict spoken word duration and pitch in Mandarin monosyllabic words

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02002 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02002/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Word-specific tonal realizations in Mandarin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07006/) (2024)
- [The realization of tones in spontaneous spoken Taiwan Mandarin: a corpus-based survey and theory-driven computational modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23163/) (2025)
- [A new kid on the block: Distributional semantics predicts the word-specific tone signatures of monosyllabic words in conversational Taiwan Mandarin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17337/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Word meaning co-determines vowel-inherent spectral change. A corpus-based investigation of conversational Mandarin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21391/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time-normalized f0 contours of Mandarin words in conversational speech have been shown to be predictable in part from their contextualized embeddings (CEs). The present study investigates whether CEs also predict spoken word duration for 7470 tokens of Mandarin monosyllabic CV words extracted from a Mandarin corpus of spontaneous speech. We show that CEs indeed are predictive for duration, above chance level, not only at the type level, but also at the level of individual tokens, as indicated by the results obtained with the type-wise and token-wise permutation baselines. We also show that the predicted durations are sufficiently precise to back-transform predicted f0 contours in [0,1] normalized time to contours on the ms time scale. The resulting predicted contours approximate empirical contours and also outperform a permutation baseline.