TONE MODELING FOR SPEECH RECOGNITION

Tone is an important linguistic component of spoken Chinese. For Chinese speech recognition, tone information is useful to differentiate words. This chapter is about automatic tone recognition for Chinese and its usefulness in automatic speech recognition. Our discussion focuses on Cantonese and Mandarin, which are the representatives of Chinese dialects that have been studied extensively. The key problematic issues in tone recognition are addressed and the major approaches in tone modeling are described. We also introduce various techniques of integrating tone recognition into state-of-the-art large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems.