Automatic speech recognition of Cantones

This paper describes our recent work on the development of a largevocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system for Cantonese-English code-mixing utterances. The details of both acoustic modeling and language modeling will be discussed. For acoustic modeling, Cantonese accents in English words are handled by applying cross-lingual acoustic units, as well as modifications in pronunciation dictionary. Statistic language models are built from a small amount of text data, as there are many limitations on data collection. Language boundary detection based on language identification algorithms is applied, and it offers a slight improvement to the overall accuracy. The recognition accuracy for Chinese characters and English lexicons in the code-mixing utterances is 56.37% and 52.99%, respectively.