Mandarin short message dictation on Symbian series 60 mobile phones

ABSTRACT

Despite having limited keypads, mobile phones are nevertheless widely used for composing text messages, and the need to process text on the mobile is growing all the time. Speech dictation is a possible solution, but has until recently not been a viable option due the limited computational resources available on mobile phones. We have previously implemented mobile speech dictation for English and other European languages. Chinese differs in many ways from European languages - Chinese is a tonal, syllabic language and written Chinese is not based on an alphabet. From a UI perspective Chinese text input is arguably more challenging than text input in European languages. In this paper we describe how we have ported our UI and dictation engine to support Mandarin Chinese. The system has been implemented to run in real time on the MCU of Nokia S60 mobile phones (E50, E60, E62 and N73).

REFERENCES

• 1: Wang, R. H., National Performance Assessment of Speech Recognition Systems for Chinese. Proceedings of Oriented COCOSDA Workshop, 1999.
• 2: Javier Ramírez, José C. Segura, Carmen Benítez, Ángel de la Torre and Antonio Rubio, "Efficient voice activity detection algorithms using long-term speech information", Speech Communication, Volume 42, Issues 3--4, April 2004, Pages 271--287.
• 3: E. Karpov , I. Kiss , J. Leppänen , J. Olsen , D. Oria , S. Sivadas , J. Tian, Short message dictation on Symbian series 60 mobile phones, Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Multimodal interfaces, November 02-04, 2006, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1180995.1181020]
• 4: S. J. Young , J. J. Odell , P. C. Woodland, Tree-based state tying for high accuracy acoustic modelling, Proceedings of the workshop on Human Language Technology, March 08-11, 1994, Plainsboro, NJ [doi>10.3115/1075812.1075885]
• 5: V. V. Digalakis, P. Monaco and H. Murveit, "Genones: Generalized Mixture Tying in Continuous Hidden Markov Model-Based Speech Recognizers", IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, vol. 4, no. 4, July 1996.
• 6: Jesper Olsen and Daniela Oria, "Profile Based Compression of N-gram Language Models", Proc. of ICASSP, 2006, Vol I, pp. 1041--1044
• 7: Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (Third Version). Shangwu Publishing House, 1996, ISBN 7-100-01777-7/H: 519
• 8: Internal report: Chinese T9 Pinyin Input, 2002
• 9: Liang Zhou , S. Imai, Chinese all syllables recognition using combination of multiple classifiers, Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1996. on Conference Proceedings., 1996 IEEE International Conference, p.3494-3497, May 07-10, 1996 [doi>10.1109/ICASSP.1996.550781]
• 10: Shulin Yang, Youan Ke and Zhong Wang, "Speaker-independent Syllable Recognition by a Pyramidical Neural Net", IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, 1991, Conference proceedings, pp 2189--2194.
• 11: Ding Guohong and Jesper Olsen, "Enhanced Syllable Rrecognition In Spoken Chinese Character Input", submitted to ASRU 2007
• 12: Roger K. Moore, Research Challenges in the Automation of Spoken Language Interaction, Proc. OfISCA/COST workshop on Applied Spoken Language Interaction in Distributed Environments (ASIDE), Aalborg, Denmark, 2005

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.5 PATTERN RECOGNITION

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors, Performance

Keywords:
Mandarin, dictation, embedded speech recognition, mobile UI