Mandarin accent adaptation based on context-independent/context-dependent pronunciation modeling

An accent adaptation approach using pronunciation variation modeling technology for Mandarin accent was proposed in this paper. As Chinese language is monosyllabic, the syllable pronunciation variation dictionary (SPVD) was built to depict the characteristics of accent. Firstly, the pronunciation modeling technology was utilized to get the context-independent and context-dependent accent-specific syllable confusion matrix according to the acoustic recognition results (pin-yin stream). Then the accent-specific Chinese SPVD was constructed from this confusion matrix. Finally, N-Best acoustic recognition candidates were re-scored with the help of SPVD. The proposed method was experimented on INTEL Shanghai-Accent Mandarin Corpus and the 863 standard Mandarin acoustic recognizer. The syllable recognition error rate was reduced 15% by context-independent SPVD, and 20% by context-dependent SPVD.