This paper addresses recent results on Mandarin spoken dialogues and introduces the collection of a large Mandarin conversational dialogue corpus. In the context of data processing, principles of transcription are proposed and accordingly a transcription tool is specifically developed for Mandarin spoken conversations.

11.1 Introduction This chapter describes the initial stages of development of a Pan-Mandarin ToBI system. We will review the salient prosodic characteristics of Mandarin, with particular attention to the range of variability within a common structural core, and then propose an initial codification of conventions for marking prosodic structure in two standard varieties and one regional variety o...

Mandarin-English Information (MEI) is one of the four projects selected for the Johns Hopkins University Summer Workshop 2000. We plan to develop technologies for using written queries to search spoken documents (cross-media) between English and Mandarin Chinese (cross-language). Our research focus is on the integration of speech recognition and machine translation technologies in the context o...

Mandarin Chinese WH-questions exhibit two syntactically interesting characteristics. First, WH-words that bear interrogative information always occur in situ.Second, in spite the above fact, I find that Mandarin WH-questions, with bounded WH-words, share the grammatical behaviors common to questions with unbounded and dislocated WH-words in other languages.Hence,intuitively,an account of Mandar...

In this paper we shall describe Dragon Systems’ 1998 Broadcast News transcription system for Mandarin. We shall describe our music classifier, which was unique to our Mandarin system, as well as our speaker change detection algorithm, ̋ which was used in our English and Mandarin systems. We shall also report on preliminary, post-evaluation experiments with pitch.

Despite its prevalence as one of the most highly influential models of spoken word recognition, the TRACE model has yet to be extended to consider tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese. A key reason for this is that the model in its current state does not encode lexical tone. In this report, we present a modified version of the jTRACE model in which we borrowed on its existing architecture t...

Previously post-focus compression (PFC) - the lowering of fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity of post-focal words to below those of the same words in identical sentences with neutral focus - was found in Beijing Mandarin but not in Taiwan Southern Min and Taiwan Mandarin. This study investigated whether the presence of PFC would vary with age and language use of societal bilinguals of Sout...

This study examines voice onset time (VOT) for phonetically voiceless word-initial stops in Mandarin Chinese and in English, as spoken by 11 Mandarin speakers and 4 British English speakers. The purpose of this paper is to compare Mandarin and English VOT patterns and to categorize their stop realizations along the VOT continuum. As expected, the findings reveal that voiceless aspirated stops i...

One of the challenges in automatic speech recognition is foreign words recognition. It is observed that a speaker’s pronunciation of a foreign word is influenced by his native language knowledge, and such phenomenon is known as the effect of language transfer. This paper focuses on examining the phonetic effect of language transfer in automatic speech recognition. A set of lexical rules is prop...