Isolated-word recognition of the complete vocabulary of spoken Chinese

The possibility of using an automatic speech recognition system as a front end to a computer for Chinese-character processing is explored in this paper. Aspects of the Chinese language are discussed in relation to the capabilities of current state-of-the-art isolated-word recognition systems. Some preliminary experiments are reported which indicate that the syllable inventory of spoken Standard Chinese belongs into the category of "difficult" vocabularies. The vocabulary size is of the order of 350 syllables with a large number of similar word pairs. Recognition rates using linear predictive coding, Itakura distance measures and dynamic time warping are of the order of 25-30%.