A study on Functional Loads of phonetic contrasts under context based on Mutual Information of Chinese text and phonemes

Phonetic contrasts (PC) are the basis of human speech communication. Different PCs have different levels of importance, which can be evaluated by the measurement of Functional Load (FL). It has also been understood that human speech perception is dependent not only on PCs but also on high-level context such as word, word sequence, grammar and etc. Thus it is desirable to take into account those context effects when estimating FLs. For this purpose, we propose in this paper a new method to meet the requirement, which estimates the FL based on Mutual Information (MI) of text and phonemes. It is capable of estimating FLs of any kinds of PCs in the context of a word sequence. Preliminary experiments were done using Chinese newspaper text corpus. The results showed to be very meaningful.