Chinese language has quite different characteristic structures from those of English. There are at least word, character, syllable, Initial-Final levels in Chinese, each carrying different levels of information with complicated correlations among them. In this paper, we investigate the dependency of pronunciation variation in conversational Mandarin speech on these different levels under various contextual conditions considering the structural features of the language. The influence of speaking rate and word frequency on such pronunciation variation is also analyzed. Different pruning methods, for including pronunciation variation in speech recognition were also evaluated, and the experimental results showed that improved accuracy is obtainable if the characteristics of the pronunciation variation found in the analysis can be properly taken into account. All discussions here are based on tests with the LDC Mandarin Call Home corpus.
Cite as: Tsai, M.-y., Chou, F.-c., Lee, L.-s. (2001) Pronunciation variation analysis with respect to various linguistic levels and contextual conditions for Mandarin Chinese. Proc. 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 2001), 1445-1448, doi: 10.21437/Eurospeech.2001-25
@inproceedings{tsai01_eurospeech,
author={Ming-yi Tsai and Fu-chiang Chou and Lin-shan Lee},
title={{Pronunciation variation analysis with respect to various linguistic levels and contextual conditions for Mandarin Chinese}},
year=2001,
booktitle={Proc. 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 2001)},
pages={1445--1448},
doi={10.21437/Eurospeech.2001-25}
}