title: Deriving disyllabic word variants from a Chinese conversational speech corpus.
abstract: Motivated by the quasi-categorical reduced forms of disyllabic words produced in Chinese conversational speech, a frequency-based selection procedure of typical pronunciation by disyllabic word type and reduction degree is proposed in this paper. This variant-selection algorithm utilizes techniques of free phone recognition and phonetic similarity score calculation to account for Chinese syllable structure. Four reduction types are suggested by considering the presence of a within-word syllable boundary: Citation form-like reduction, marginal segment deletion, nuclei merger, and syllable merger. The results show that the most frequent reduction types for disyllabic words in Chinese conversation are citation form-like reduction and syllable merger. In particular, high-frequency disyllabic words preferentially take the extreme syllable-merger form. As shown in the analysis, segmental reduction in Chinese disyllabic words is morphology-dependent. It is also related to the prosodic position at which a disyllabic word is produced as well as the temporal quality of the word. Finally, in the automatic speech recognition experiments, the performance was improved by adding a small number of variants selected by the algorithm to the pronunciation dictionary of the system.
authors.affiliation: Graduate Institute of Information Systems and Applications, National Tsing Hua University, 101, Section 2, Kuang-Fu Road, Hsinchu, 30013, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Yi-Fen
authors.initials: YF
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 128, Section 2, Academia Road, Taipei, 11529, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Shu-Chuan
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Tseng
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Jyh-Shing Roger
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Jang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002681:China; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013062:Speech Articulation Tests; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*