USTC95-a Putonghua corpus

For the standard spoken Chinese dialect commonly known as Putonghua or Mandarin, a large corpus called USTC95 (University of Science and Technology of China, ´95) is introduced, which is primarily designed to support research in Chinese speech recognition and analysis and in recognition system evaluation. This corpus consists of four major sub-corpora, corresponding to isolated syllables, multi-syllable words, sentences and telephone speech. With an elaborate design, the corpus encompasses all the phones and mono-syllables, as well as the co-articulation effects in Putonghua; also, it keeps as little redundancy as possible. This parsimonious corpus makes it possible to acquire acoustic-phonetic knowledge for isolated word recognition and continuous Chinese recognition, to provide speech data for training a telephone speech recognizer, and also to provide a common test base for the performance assessment of the recognizer