Jurilinguistic Engineering in Cantonese Chinese: An N-gram-based Speech to Text Transcription System

A Cantonese Chinese transcription system to automatically convert stenograph code to Chinese characters is reported. The major challenge in developing such a system is the critical homocode problem because of homonymy. The statistical N-gram model is used to compute the best combination of characters. Supplemented with a 0.85 million character corpus of domain-specific training data and enhancement measures, the bigram and trigram implementations achieve 95% and 96% accuracy respectively, as compared with 78% accuracy in the baseline model. The system performance is comparable with other advanced Chinese Speech-to-Text input applications under development. The system meets an urgent need of the Judiciary of post1997 Hong Kong. Keyword: Speech to Text, Statistical Modelling, Cantonese, Chinese, Language Engineering