In order to pursue high performance of Chinese information access on the Internet, this paper presents an attractive approach with a successful integration of efficient speech recognition and information retrieval techniques. A working system based on the proposed approach for speech retrieval of real-time Chinese netnews services has been implemented and tested. Very exciting performance has been achieved.

This correspondence presents the first known results of complete recognition of continuous Mandarin speech for the Chinese language with very large vocabulary but very limited training data. Various acoustic and linguistic processing techniques were developed, and a prototype system of a continuous speech Mandarin dictation machine has been successfully implemented. The best recognition accuracy achieved is 92.2% for finally decoded Chinese characters.