Research of Chinese-English Bilingual Acoustic Modeling
Bo Xu · Zhongwen xinxi xuebao · 2004
In this paper, three different approaches of Chinese-English bilingual acoustic modeling are investigated and compared. The first approach is to simply combine Chinese and English phone inventories together without phone shared across the languages. The second one is to map language-dependent phones to the inventory of the International Phonetic Association (IPA) based on phonetic knowledge to construct the bilingual phone inventory. The third one is to merge the language-dependent phone models by hierarchical phone clustering algorithm to get a compact bilingual inventory. Experimental results show that phone clustering approach outperforms IPA-based phone mapping approach, and it can also achieve comparable performance to the simple combination of language-dependent phone inventories with less model parameters, especially when using acoustic likelihood measurement.