Open vocabulary Chinese name recognition with the help of character description and syllable spelling recognition

The open vocabulary name recognition technique is one of the very challenging tasks in the application of automated Chinese speech recognition technology. It can be applied to the free name input of any telephony speech application or automatic directory assistance system. A Chinese name usually has two to three characters, with each pronounced as a single syllable. It is a high perplexity task to recognize a word from a long list of candidates, like more than billions of names in our experiments. Two novel approaches under an interactive framework were proposed in our previous paper for five hundred thousand names and are now applied for open vocabulary Chinese name recognition - character description recognition (CDR) and syllable spelling recognition (SSR). Together with our robust finite-state recognizer and given a graph-structured syllable lexicon for the full names, we achieved a very promising name recognition success rate, 86.7%, in our system-initiative dialogue system.