Automation of cross-dialectal tone generation and sandhi manipulation

Junjie He

Abstract: An algorithm was developed to automatically generate tones across dialects within the government phonology framework to achieve universal tone processing. An analysis of the results of the sandhi algorithms for Tianjin and Danyang Chinese dialects concludes that the automated algorithm based on government-phonological tonal theories is very effective. The code is simple and concise and can be readily ported to other tonal languages or dialects. All these come from the unique explanatory device of the tonal theory of government phonology.