Dialectal Chinese Speech Recognition.ppt

Dialectal Chinese Speech Recognition Thomas Fang Zheng Oct. 29, 2004 Motivation Chinese ASR encounters an issue that is bigger than that of any other language - dialect. There are 8 major dialectal regions in addition to Mandarin (Northern China), including:- Wu (Southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai); Yue (Guangdong, Hong Kong, Nanning Guangxi); Min (Fujian, Shantou Guangdong, Haikou Hainan, Taipei Taiwan); Hakka (Meixian Guangdong, Hsin-chu Taiwan); Gan (Jiangxi); Xiang (Hunan); Hui (Anhui) Jin (Shanxi, Hohehot Inner Mongolia). Can be further divided into over 40 sub-categories. Chinese dialects share a same written language:- The same Chinese pinyin set (canonically), The same Chinese character set (canonically), and The same vocabulary (canonically). And standard Chinese (known as Putonghua, or PTH) is widely spoken in most regions over China. However, speech is strongly influenced by the native dialects; Most Chinese people speak in both standard Chinese and their own dialect, resulting in dialectal Chinese - Putonghua influenced by native dialect In dialectal Chinese:- Word usage, pronunciation, and syntax and grammar vary depending on the speakers dialect. ASR relies to a great extent on the consistent pronunciation and usage of words within a language. ASR systems constructed to process PTH perform poorly for the great majority of the population. Project Goal To develop a general framework to model in dialectal Chinese ASR tasks :- Phonetic variability, Lexical variability, and Pronunciation variability To find suitable methods to modify the baseline PTH recognizer to obtain a dialectal Chinese recognizer for the specific dialect of interest, which employ :- dialect-related knowledge (syllable mapping, cross-dialect synonyms, …), and training/adaptation data (in relatively small quantities, or even no) Expectation: the resulted recognizer should also work for PTH, in other words, it should be good for a mixture of PTH and dialectal Chinese. This