Subject: various subjects

From: Ed Lai <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 May 90 08:08:16 -0700

>The speech recognition system suffered high failure rate. The fact
>is, you'll have to "train" it virtually every time you want to
>use it. The joke that the group had was that system would recognize
>your voice in the morning and it would reject you in the afternoon;
>it would recognize your happy voice, but would be confused the
>minute you change your mood. I would not be surprised if the newly
>introduced system behaved the same way.

A story which I have heard from MIT media lab may be interesting. At MIT
they have devloped a speech recognization system that seems to work quite
well, but when they demostrate to their sponsor, it completely breaks down.
Finally they figure out why. The person who is working on it is a graduate
student, and the sponsor you can guess it is the miltary, so you have a
few big shot military brass watching a graduate student doing a big demo,
you can see the anxiety level of the graduate student. The stress introduce
changes to the voice that may not be detectable by the human ear, but it is
very significant for the system, so it was a failure. Their solution is
suprisingly simple. When you are talking on the telephone, if the other
party is completely silent, soon you would be very uneasy, so they usually
make some sound like ha-huh so that the other party know you are still
listening. So at MIT they have their software recognize gaps in the speech,
and then generate the ha-huh sound as if the machine is listening. This
calm the speaker and the experiment can be conducted in normal.

>Actually, in the Chinese metafonts I've been developing (very slowly, and
>please don't write for information, as I don't have any), I've been putting
>in stroke counts and have been considering adding radicals (`bu4shou3').
>The problem with radicals is that there are so many radical systems around.
>I'm satisfied with the one used in _Kang1 Xi1 zi4dian3_, but it won't work
>at all for jiantizi.

For fanti, Kangxi's radical grouping is definitely the standard. For jianti
the one used in the GB document is pretty much the standard.

Scott, does that means that you have stroke count information for each
character in jiantizi in electronic readable form. If you do I am interested
in getting that information into my dictionary stack. I have it already for
fanti.

>Ed Lai of Apple wrote a Chinese dictionary for Macintosh HyperCard.  It is
>not a real dictinary, what it does is exactly what we are talking here:
>the Chinese indexing.

When I started the dictonary stack, my interest indeed is indexing, however
the indexing is indexing in an electronic media rather than a printed media
as is dicussed lately in CCNET. For me, indexing in printed media you cannot
do any better than what they are doing in dictionary or telephone book now.
so it is not very interesting. For electronic indexing it is wide open and
we can go much further. In version 0.1, I am just imitateing a paper
dictionary, i.e. by radical, by sound or by stroke count (stroke count is
for fanti version only since as I said I do not have that data). However, at
that time the superioity of electronic media is evident because of the rapid
naviagation that is possible, a mouse click is all it takes. So if you want
to find one(yi), but you want the complex version used on cheques, you have
no idea what radical it belongs to, you have no idea how to find it by sound
(not very likely?, but that version use bopomofo for fanti, so if you do not
know the bopomofo symbol, you cannot find the sound), but you can still find
yi (the one stroke version) by stroke count, after getting one stroke yi
click on the sound to get all the yi sound, then click on the mulitple stroke
yi to arrive the character you want. Since each step takes about one second,
it is not too bad even you have to take a big detour. For version 0.2, what I
did was to let you use either pinyin/bopomofo/zhuyin2/wade-gile/yale. Unlike
somebody else's philosophy, I believe that the user is the best judge of what
is the best for himself. Also the sound table can be arrange in alphabetical
order or as a two dimension matrix of consonant and vowel part, with a
representative character as the matrix element. In version 0.3, you can do
boolean search such as "all characters with water radical and yi sound",
"all characters with water compoent and wood component".

Is this the ulitmate? Hardly. I do not even call it version 1.0. There is a
lot more we can do when we have more data. I need stroke count data,
component data, type of stroke of each stroke data. Timothy Huang suggested
adding rhyming data and he sent me an article on what is rhyming but I cannot
understand it. Also I am interested in data on what sound are more similiar
and hence more easily confused (which incidently is useful for speech
recognization use). Also I am interesting in ci data rather than zi data so
that we can do search such as "give me the character X where X-dian is a ci.
The possiblity of electronic indexing is infinite.

/* Disclaimer: All statments and opinions expressed are my own */
/* Edmund K. Lai                                               */
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