Decoupling recognition and transcription in Mandarin ASR

08/02/2021

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by   Jiahong Yuan, et al.

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Much of the recent literature on automatic speech recognition (ASR) is taking an end-to-end approach. Unlike English where the writing system is closely related to sound, Chinese characters (Hanzi) represent meaning, not sound. We propose factoring audio -> Hanzi into two sub-tasks: (1) audio -> Pinyin and (2) Pinyin -> Hanzi, where Pinyin is a system of phonetic transcription of standard Chinese. Factoring the audio -> Hanzi task in this way achieves 3.9 CER (character error rate) on the Aishell-1 corpus, the best result reported on this dataset so far.