Development of a large vocabulary speech database for Cantonese

This paper describes work on developing a large vocabulary speech database for Cantonese. As a major Chinese dialect, Cantonese is spoken by tens of millions of people in Southern China and Hong Kong. It is very different from Mandarin or Putonghua in phonology, phonetics, vocabulary and grammatical structure. A speech database specially designed for Cantonese is urgently needed for the design, implementation and performance evaluation of various speech recognition systems. The proposed database contains a large number of speech utterances which include isolated syllables, polysyllabic words and phonetically rich sentences. It covers most of the intra-syllable and inter-syllable acoustic variations