The Preliminary Results of a Mandarin Dictation Machine Based Upon Chinese Natural Language Analysis

This paper describes the preliminary results of the first research effort toward a Mandarin dictation machine in the world for the input of Chinese characters to computers. Considering the special characteristics of Chinese language, syllables are chosen as the basic units for dictation. The machine is divided into two subsystems. The first is to recognize the syllables using speech signal processing techniques. Because every syllable can represent many different characters with completely different meaning, the second subsystem then identifies the exact characters from the syllables and corrects the errors in syllable recognition by first forming all possible words from the syllables then finding out one combination of the words which is grammatically valid in a sentence. The preliminary test results indicate that such a dictation machine is not only practically attractive, but technically achievable.