The text design for continuous speech database of standard Chinese

Well developed continuous speech recognition systems need a higher quality, scientific designed, succinct and valid continuous speech database. At the first stage the database should be mainly limited in read speech. To describe very complex variances in continuous speech, we propose the following speech units: (1) 401 syllables witout tone. (2) 415 inter-syllabic diphones. (3) 3035 inter-syllabic triphones. (4) 781 inter-syllabicfinal-initial structures. We also give 17 sentence patterns to include the prosodic phenomena. Using automatic method 2185 sentences and 388 phrases are collected by above phonetic rules from a big corpus-recent years “Peple's Daily” and so on, as the read text of continuous speech recognition database in Standard Chinese. This set of sentences covers 99.8% syllables without tone, 100% inter-syllabic diphoes, 99.6% inter-syllabic triphones and 100% sentence patterns.