A fully parallel Mandarin speech recognition system with very large vocabulary and almost unlimited texts

Abstract

This paper describes a fully parallel real-time Mandarin dictation machine which recognizes Mandarin speech with almost unlimited texts and very large vocabulary for the input of Chinese characters to computers. Isolated syllables including the tones are first recognized using specially trained hidden Markov models with special feature parameters, the exact characters are then identified from the syllables using a Markov Chinese language model, because every syllable can represent many different homonym characters. The real-time implementation is in Occam language on a transputer system with 10 T8OO processors operating in parallel. The overall correction rate for the final output characters is about 89%.