Incorporating pitch features for tone modeling in automatic recognition of Mandarin Chinese
Name
702369091-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
3.14 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
876532ecc1d8122126669c1a1b75b71f
Author(s)
Chu, Karen Lingyun
Advisor(s)
Wade Shen and Robert C. Berwick.
Date Issued
2009
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Tone plays a fundamental role in Mandarin Chinese, as it plays a lexical role in determining the meanings of words in spoken Mandarin. For example, these two sentences ... (I like horses) and ... (I like to scold) differ only in the tone carried by the last syllable. Thus, the inclusion of tone-related information through analysis of pitch data should improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems on Mandarin Chinese. The focus of this thesis is to improve the performance of a non-tonal automatic speech recognition (ASR) system on a Mandarin Chinese corpus by implementing modifications to the system code to incorporate pitch features. We compile and format a Mandarin Chinese broadcast new corpus for use with the ASR system, and implement a pitch feature extraction algorithm. Additionally, we investigate two algorithms for incorporating pitch features in Mandarin Chinese speech recognition. Firstly, we build and test a baseline tonal ASR system with embedded tone modeling by concatenating the cepstral and pitch feature vectors for use as the input to our phonetic model (a Hidden Markov Model, or HMM). We find that our embedded tone modeling algorithm does improve performance on Mandarin Chinese, showing that including tonal information is in fact contributive for Mandarin Chinese speech recognition. Secondly, we implement and test the effectiveness of HMM-based multistream models.
Description
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-56).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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