ملخص: This paper describes a study on tone statistics of peoples' names in Mandarin Chinese. The problem was brought out when we tried to apply an English version of a speech recognizer to a Chinese voice tag dialing task. The questions were: (1) How serious is the tone-confusable problem in a Chinese voice tag dialing system? (2) Do we need to enhance the recognizer to properly recognize tonal languages? To gain more information, we studied a Chinese name database consisting of 1.6 million names. The statistical analysis shows the potential for a problem with tone-confusable names in a Mandarin voice tag dialing system. We developed a tone enhancement approach to turn an English speech recognizer to a tonal language speech recognizer. We performed benchmark testing to compare recognition performance of an English version speech recognizer and a tone-enhanced version, both working on a small database of Chinese names. Then we did a pseudo-recognition analysis for the large Chinese voice tag database. From this analysis we conclude that enhancing an English version speech recognizer to add tonal recognition capabilities would improve recognition of Chinese names, reducing the recognition error rate by 10–20%.

لغة: إنجليزية