Chinese large-vocabulary name recognition system using character description and syllable spelling recognition

The large-vocabulary name recognition technique is one of the challenging tasks in the application of Chinese speech recognition technology. It can be applied on long-list automatic attendant systems and automatic directory assistance systems. A Chinese name has usually two to three characters with each character pronounced as a single syllable. It is a high perplexity task to recognize a word from a long-list of candidates, like more than three hundred thousand unique names in our experiments, given a very short utterance like one to two seconds of speech. Two novel approaches under an interactive framework are proposed in this paper to aid the recognition of a Chinese name: character description recognition (CDR) and syllable spelling recognition (SSR). Together with our robust finite-state recognizer given a graph-structured syllable lexicon for the full names, we achieved a very promising name recognition success rate, 94.5%, in our system-initiative dialogue system.