The model for the process of F0 contour generation, first proposed by Fujisaki and his coworkers, has been successfully applied to Mandarin, which is a typical tone language with a distinct feature that both positive and negative tone commands are required. However, the inverse problem, viz., automatic derivation of the model parameters from an observed F0 contour, is more difficult for Mandarin than for those non-tone languages, because the polarity of tone commands cannot be inferred directly from the F0 contour itself. In this paper, an efficient method is proposed to solve the problem by using the information on syllable timing and tone labels. With the same framework as that proposed for Japanese and English, the method presented here for Mandarin is focused on the firstorder estimation of tone command parameters. A set of intrasyllable and inter-syllable rules are constructed to recognize the tone command patterns within each syllable. The experiment shows that the method works effectively and gives results comparable to those obtained by manual analysis.