Decoupling recognition and transcription in Mandarin ASR

Understand

Much of the recent literature on automatic speech recognition (ASR) is taking an end-to-end approach.

• Unlike English where the writing system is closely related to sound, Chinese characters (Hanzi) represent meaning, not sound.
• We propose factoring audio -> Hanzi into two sub-tasks: (1) audio -> Pinyin and (2) Pinyin -> Hanzi, where Pinyin is a system of phonetic transcription of standard Chinese.
• Factoring the audio -> Hanzi task in this way achieves 3.9% CER (character error rate) on the Aishell-1 corpus, the best result reported on this dataset so far.