Construction of Chinese conversational corpora for spontaneous speech recognition and comparative study on the trilingual parallel corpora

摘要

In this paper, we describe the development of Chinese conversational segmented and POS-tagged corpora currently used in the NICT/ATR speech-to-speech translation system. Over 500K manually checked utterances provide 3.5M words of Chinese corpora. As far as we know, they are the largest conversational textual corpora; in the domain of travel. A set of three parallel corpora is obtained with the corresponding pairs of Japanese and English words from which the Chinese words are translated. Based on these parallel corpora, we make an investigation on the statistics of each language, performances of language model and speech recognition, and find the differences among these languages. The problems and their solutions to the present Chinese corpora are also analyzed and discussed.