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Machine Readable Phonetic Transcription System for Chinese Dialects Spoken in Taiwan

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Machine Readable Phonetic Transcription System for Chinese Dialects Spoken in Taiwan J. Acoust. Soc. Jpn. (E) 20, 3 (1999) Machine readable phonetic transcription system for Chinese dialects spoken in Taiwan Chiu-yu Tseng and Fu-chiang Chou Institute of Linguistics (Preparatory Office), Academia Sinica, Nankang Taipei 115, Taiwan, Republic of China (Received 4 August 1998) Since existing ASCII versions of phonetic transcription systems appear to aim at transcribing European languages only, they prove to be insufficient to accommodate syllable based tonal languages such as Chinese. An ASCII encoding of phonetic transcription system for speech database of Chinese was designed. Major characteristics of the proposed design are : 1. Though based on the principles of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the current design includes two levels of transcription, namely, segmental and prosodic. The conse- quence is a more elaborate system than the IPA or its equivalent. 2. The proposed system specifically aims to transcribe three major Chinese dialects spoken in Taiwan, namely, Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka. The consequence is a more language-dependent system rather than a general system as the IPA. Keywords : Chinese, Tone, Transcription, Prosody PACS number : 43. 72.-q display the full range of IPA symbols, or one may 1. INTRODUCTION design' an alphabetic and/or numeric representation A well-transcribed speech database is crucial to of the IPA symbols instead. There exist many both basic speech research and the development of alphabetic equivalent systems for speech databases related speech technologies. When constructing a such as ARPABET and KLATTBET (for American transcription system, there are many levels of tran- English), Edinburgh's Machine Readable Phonetic scription that may be considered and included in the Alphabet (for. British English), SAMPA3,4) (for system. For example, orthographic transcription, European languages) and OGI's WORLDBET (for citation-phonemic representation, broad phonetic all languages).5) Since we set the prerequisite of transcription, narrows phonetic transcription, our system for three specific Chinese dialects, name- acoustic-phonetic transcription, prosodic transcrip- ly, the three major Chinese dialects spoken in Ta- tion and even representation of non-linguistic but iwan, it seems feasible to avoid possible notational significant phenomena.1) The nature of our complexity by keeping all symbols distinct across proposed system is an ASCII version of broad the intended target languages as did OGI's WORLD phonetic transcription system with additional BET. The other reason is that each phonetic sym- prosodic labels. bol in WORLDBET is represented as two ASCII The citation-phonemic level of transcription con- characters. In order to maintain the two-character tains the output phoneme string derived from the format, an extra space is required after those sym- orthographic form (by lexical access, by letter-to- bols that have only one character. While this sound rules, or both).2) There are various alterna- process may be convenient to the computer, it could tives to represent phonemes with symbols. One be somewhat less convenient to human transcribers. may develop a platform that possesses the facility to Therefore, we chose to adopt the SAMPA system 215 J. Acoust. Soc. Jpn. (E) 20, 3 (1999) originally designed for major European languages, events, such as F0 peaks. The former theoretical and adjusted it to a language-specific set of alpha- orientation, i.e., the use of boundaries, resulted in betic phoneme symbols for the target Chinese dia- approaches that used intonation categories lects spoken in Taiwan. proposed by Ref. 6) to process suprasegmental infor- Though based on the IPA, the proposed system mation, such as intonation phrase, phonological chose not to provide symbols to represent informa- phrase, phonological word, foot, and syllable. tion as would the diacritics of the IPA. The result Alternatively, it could mark the more traditional is a less sophisticated system for segmental symbols ; units of "minor tone-unit" and "major tone-unit," something we define as a broad phonetic system. as in the MARSEC database.7 The latter theoreti- That is, though the system aimed at enabling a cal orientation, i.e., the occurrence of isolated transcriber to represent tokens of speech from our prosodic events, resulted in the marking of these informants, the transcription is nonetheless occurrences of high and low tones of various kinds. restricted to phonetic categories rather than labeling The recently formulated ToBI transcription system8) finer phonetic details. Consequently, the tran- is the most well-known system of this kind, and scriber would somewhat be forced to label the apparently works for non-tonal languages such as speech tokens with a set of phonetic symbols avail- English and Japanese, where the prosodic units are able without the tools to represent IPA diacritic annotated at the "break index" level rather than the information. Our rationale is that since ortho- "tone" level. We chose to adopt a ToBI-like frame- graphic text is readily available for our working work for the prosodic transcription of our system, speech data, we have all the information necessary but needed to modify it to suit our target languages. to determine what the intended speech should be. Needless to say, the modification is somewhat elabo- The task of our transcriber is to listen to the col- rate due to the intrinsic differences between intona- lected speech data and make direct reference between tion languages and tonal languages. the intended citation string from text to the actual The paper is organized as followed Section 2 utterance produced. In some sense, the transcrip- describes the reported broad phonetic transcrip- tion can be seen as part transcription and part tion. ; Section 3 the prosodic transcription. The mapping to text. Moreover, the designed broad experiments are described in Section 4. phonetic representation at this stage also does not 2. BROAD PHONETIC possess the capability to label common phenomena of running speech, such as place assimilation, conso- TRANSCRIPTION nant deletion and vowel reduction. We are fully To establish a broad phonetic transcription sys- aware that once running speech is incorporated into tem for a specific language, one needs to first define our speech database, we will need to expand the the phoneme set and corresponding symbols. The system to accommodate running speech transcrip- most likely choice would be the IPA symbols, which tion in the future. We will also need to include has long been established as the system that is tonal notations in our system in the future since all sufficiently equipped to represent sound systems of three Chinese dialects possess lexical tones at the known languages of the world. Unfortunately, syllabic level. there is no uniformly implemented coding standard Leaving tonal representations for future work, we for the IPA symbols until efforts such as ISO 10646/ chose to focus our attention to transcribe and label Unicode is accepted internationally. The reported our speech database at the prosodic level. Since system is designed to function with the SAMPA there are less clear acoustic correlates to prosodic guidelines, but tailored to suit the target languages phenomena, this level is less straightforward than mentioned. phonemic annotation, and the units segmented un- SAMPA is a phonetic transcription coding that avoidably tend to tilt towards the particular chosen uses normal ASCII characters as replacements for theoretical framework. A basic distinction may be IPA symbols. Mapping of the IPA symbols onto drawn between a prosodic labeling system that ASCII codes was set up, using up to range 37-126, annotates the boundaries of units (analogous to the 7-bit printable ASCII characters only. Originally method used in phonemic annotation) and a system designed as a phonemic/broad-phonetic transcrip- that annotates the occurrence of isolated prosodic tion system for European languages, both SAMPA 216 C. TSENG and F. CHOU : MACHINE READABLE PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION FOR CHINESE "p" notation to represent the voicelessbilabial pair and subsequently proposed X-SAMPA (Extended SAMPA) represent an international collaborative in Mandarin. Voicing is therefore not represented. basis for a standard machine-readable encoding of All other notations for the remaining obstruents phonetic notations. Guidelines for coding (map- follow the same principle. This somewhat arbi- ping) of languages to be transcribed are also avail- trary use of notation is maintained when the system able. The reported system was designed by follow- is expanded to include Taiwanese and Hakka where ing these guidelines, especially maintaining the fea- voicing contrasts also exist. That is, though the ture that the resulted transcription is uniquely pars- voiced counterparts do exist for bilabials and velars able as specified in SAMPA. As SAMPA in Taiwanese and Hakka, making it a three-way specified, we also observed the IPA transcription contrast instead, "p" and "b" still represent the convention of leaving no space between a string of voiceless bilabial pair which differs in aspiration successive symbols unless syllable boundaries occur. while an upper case "B" is used to represent the However, we note that the basic form of SAMPA voiced bilabial. The same rule also applies to velar "G" and postalveolar affricate "DZ" was designed as a phonemic or broad-phonetic tran- . scription system at the segmental level. That leaves Another kind of contrast that
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