Tone on a Budget: A Reference-Free Metric for Lexical Tone in Massively Multilingual Text-to-Speech
In Yorùbá, pitch alone separates \d{o}k\d{o} (husband, Mid), \d{o}k\d{ò} (vehicle, Low), and \d{o}k\d{ó} (hoe, High) -- the diacritics ARE the tone marks. Yet character error rate (CER), the standard automated metric for text-to-speech (TTS), is in practice computed from ASR output that drops those marks: a synthesizer can ace CER and still say vehicle for husband. We introduce DunDun -- named for the dùndún, the Yorùbá talking drum that speaks through pitch alone -- an automated, reference-free lexical-tone metric that needs no tone-labelled corpus. The gold High/Mid/Low sequence is read from the input text's diacritics (in TTS that text exists by construction, so no reference recording ...
| Authors | Moses Daudu, Adeola Enitan Bamidele, Honor-Jesus Bezaleel |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 September 2026 |
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