Subject: Re: patter recognition

From: "LI Jialin, UGA Physics" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 90 11:36:17 EST

Talking about Chinese text input method, there is someone, Dong qiqi, working
on "speaking" recongnition. I was told, it's very "promising".

Scott, why didn't you include this into your wish list? :-)

Jialin

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From: Jay Sekora <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 90 13:52:20 -0400

>on "speaking" recongnition. I was told, it's very "promising".

I would expect Chinese voice input to be *MUCH* easier than, say, English or
French voice recognition, because
(1) Chinese has relatively few consonants, and
(2) they are acoustically easy to distinguish (e.g., aspirated vs. unaspirated;
  cf. English ``voiced'' and ``voiceless'', which are really cluster concepts--
  `p'-sounds are often unaspirated and partly voiced, while `b'-sounds are
  often unvoiced),
(3) Chinese has vastly fewer consonant clusters, and vastly-fewer cross-
  syllable contiguous consonants, and, most importantly,
(4) Chinese is tonal.  It's a lot of trouble to get a computer to distinguish
  between a `t'-sound and a `p'-sound.  It's fairly easy to get a computer to
  distinguish between a falling pitch contour and a rising pitch contour.  Of
  course, Chinese uses both distinctions, but the point is that you can get,
  say, 80% of the phonetic information in a Chinese word (`syllable' would be
  an unfair comparison) far more easily than you can get 80% of the phonetic
  information in an English word.

I'd be interested in hearing more about Mr. Dong's work.  Is there a paper
reference?

-j.