Automatic initial/final generation for dialectal Chinese speech recognition

Phonetic differences always exist between any Chinese dialect and standard Chinese (Putonghua). In this paper, a method, named automatic dialect-specific Initial/Final (IF) generation, is proposed to deal with the issue of phonemic difference which can automatically produce the dialect-specific units based on model distance measure. A dialect-specific decision tree regrowing method is also proposed to cope with the tri-IF expansion due to the introduction of dialect-specific IFs (DIFs). In combination with a certain adaptation technique, the proposed methods can achieve a syllable error rate (SER) reduction of 18.5% for Shanghai-accented Chinese compared with the Putonghua-based baseline while the use of the DIF set only can lead to an SER reduction of 5.5%.