Optimized Chinese Pronunciation Prediction by Component-Based Statistical Machine Translation
Zhu Shun-le · Journal of Information Processing Systems · 2021
To eliminate ambiguities in the existing methods to simplify Chinese pronunciation learning, we propose a model that can predict the pronunciation of Chinese characters automatically. The proposed model relies on a statistical machine translation (SMT) framework. In particular, we consider the components of Chinese characters as the basic unit and consider the pronunciation prediction as a machine translation procedure (the component sequence as a source sentence, the pronunciation, pinyin, as a target sentence). In addition to traditional features such as the bidirectional word translation and the n-gram language model, we also implement a component similarity feature to overcome some typos during practical use. We incorporate these features into a log-linear model. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms other baseline models.