Standardization on Cantonese Romanization and the Building
Blocks for Phonetic based Applications
Introduction
In this project, we aim to produce a standardized Cantonese Romanization method,
also referred to as the Cantonese Pinyin method, which is a transcription system to denote Cantonese pronunciations.
The list of Cantonese pronunciation(s) using this romanized notation will be provided for all Chinese character in Big5 and ISO 10646.
Cantonese romanization is the second step in the standardization of Chinese processing in Hong Kong as
it provides a standard mechanism to denote the Cantonese pronunciations of Chinese characters in computers.
The provision of the Cantonese phonetic information of Chinese characters is essential in the development of voice-related technology for people in Hong Kong.
Examples of the technology areas that can benefit from this work include text-to-speech systems, voice recognition, and Cantonese transcription and computer-aided instruction.
These technologies in turn can provide a much more user-friendly interface to computer users.
As a result, they will definitely boost the use of computers and also make Chinese information more accessible through computers.
Another important aspect of this work is that it provides the essential building blocks for tools on computer aided Chinese teaching as
the phonetic information of Chinese is made available through the computers.
