Golden Mandarin Series

 

In classical Chinese literature, it was said that the most beautiful sound in the world is that produced by knocking a piece of gold by a piece of jade, or “sound of gold and jade”(金玉之聲,金聲玉振). For the researchers in the speech processing laboratory of National Taiwan University in early years who focused their works on synthesis/recognition of Mandarin Speech, the most beautiful sound in the world is certainly Mandarin speech. They therefore named their prototype systems the "Golden Mandarin series". After mid nighties the works of the lab were extended to different areas of speech processing and the technologies developed in most cases can be equally applicable to all different languages. So all sounds of speech are beautiful, and "Golden Mandarin series" are not limited to Chinese language systems any longer.

 

The Golden Mandarin series prototype systems include at least the following:

First Generation Chinese Text-to-speech System (1984)
First Generation Chinese Natural Language Sentence Parser (1986)
Golden Mandarin (I) - Mandarin Dictation System (1991)
Golden Mandarin (II) - Mandarin Dictation System (1993)
Golden Mandarin (III) - Mandarin Dictation Systems (1995,96,98,99)
Voice Retrieval of Chinese Texts (1997)
Voice Retrieval of Mandarin Spoken Documents
(1998)
Voice Retrieval of Mandarin Broadcast News (1999)
Mandarin Spoken Dialogue System for Telephone Directory (1998)
Mandarin Spoken Dialogue System for Train Ticket Reservation (1998)
Second Generation Chinese Text-to-speech System
(1999)
Mandarin Broadcast News Summarization System
(2005)
Intelligent Broadcast News Browser   (2006)
Virtual Instructor: Intelligent Course Lecture Browser
(2009)
NTU Chinese: Computer-assisted Language Learning for Chinese (2008)
Personal Photo Browser (2013)
MOOCs Lecture Organizer (2014)


                                                           

「金聲玉振」在華文古典文獻中被用來描述世上最美麗的聲音,亦即「金玉之聲」。 台灣大學的語音實驗室早年致力於以電腦處理華語語音之研究,不但為華文電腦裝上耳與嘴,更期待未來華語語音可以成為華文社會進入全球網路資訊世界最方便的 工具。對於實驗室的工作人員而言,華語的聲音實為「金玉之聲」,故把研究成果的實驗系統命名為「金聲系列」。中期以後,台灣大學語音實驗室的研究領域逐步 擴大衍伸,不再限於單純的語音合成或辨識,而及於語音技術的諸多層面及不同方向;也不再限於華語,多數成果都可同樣適用於任何語言。此時任何語言的聲音都 是「金玉之聲」「金聲系列」也不再限於華語實驗系統。