System and method of intelligent mandarin speech input for chinese

Abstract

A Mandarin speech input system and method for directly translating arbitrary sentences of Mandarin speech into corresponding Chinese characters is disclosed. The system and method comprises acoustic processing section and linguistic decoding section. The acoustic processing step employs 'Segmental Probability Models' to calculate the probabilities of each of the mono-syllables in the Mandarin speech input and each of the tones thereof for further recognition. The linguistic decoding step employs 'Word-class-based Chinese Language Models' to locate the corresponding Chinese characters for the series of recognized syllables provided by said acoustic processing step. A Mandarin dictation machine translates the provided speeches into characters in accordance with above method and displays the characters. The dictation machine is featured for the 'intelligence' that can 'learn' if taught by including several 'intelligent learning techniques' such as automatic new user's voice learning to enable the new user can use the dictation machine quickly, automatic environmental noise learning to adapt to the environmental noise in the user's environment, and continuous on-line learning of user's voice, special words, wording and sentence styles to continuously improve the correct recognition rate.