From phonology and acoustic properties to automatic recognition of Cantonese

Cantonese is a common Chinese dialect used by tens of millions of people residing in Southern China and in Hong Kong. It is a monosyllabic and tonal language and is very different from the Chinese official language, Putonghua or Mandarin. We describe the recent development in designing efficient algorithms based on artificial neural networks for tone classification and syllable recognition of Cantonese. The basic phonological structure together with those acoustic-phonetic features that are essential for Cantonese syllable recognition are also discussed