Toward a Parallel Corpus of Spoken Cantonese and Written Chinese

Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 1462–1466, Chiang Mai, Thailand, November 8 – 13, 2011. c⃝2011 AFNLP Toward a Parallel Corpus of Spoken Cantonese and Written Chinese John Lee The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics City University of Hong Kong jsylee@cityu.edu.hk Abstract We introduce a parallel corpus of spoken Can- tonese and written Chinese. This sentence- aligned corpus consists of transcriptions of Cantonese spoken in television programs in Hong Kong, and their corresponding Chinese (Mandarin) subtitles. Preliminary evaluation shows that the corpus reflects known syntactic differences between Cantonese and Mandarin, facilitates quantitative analyses on these dif- ferences, and already reveals some phenomena not yet discussed in the literature. 1 Introduction While standard Chinese, also known as Manda- rin or Putonghua, is served by an ever-expanding set of linguistic resources1, its various dialects have received relatively little attention. The use of these Chinese dialects, however, is as wide- spread as many other national languages. For example, Cantonese is spoken by more than 52 million people, mostly in southern China and overseas Chinese communities. Although considered the “most widely known and influential variety of Chinese other than Mandarin” (Matthews & Yip, 1994), Cantonese currently has rather limited linguistic resources. This paucity may be due to its unofficial status, as opposed to Mandarin, which is the official language of China. Furthermore, as a primarily spoken language, it does not traditionally have any standard written form. This paper presents the first parallel corpus of transcribed Cantonese speech and its equivalent written Mandarin. The corpus is expected to be useful for language 1 For example, (Chen et al., 1996), (Xue et al., 2005), and (Tsou & Kwong, 2006), among many others learners, linguists and developers of natural lan- guage processing applications. The corpus provides students with authentic, parallel examples of sentences in both languages, which are not mutually intelligible. Native speakers of Cantonese must learn Mandarin for use in writing and official communication; con- versely, many Mandarin speakers living in Hong Kong also want to learn Cantonese. The corpus also serves as a repository for lin- guistic research. In particular, it facilitates re- search in comparative grammar, by lending sta- tistical evidence, and potentially demonstrating exceptions or other differences yet unnoticed. Finally, it can be exploited as training material for natural language processing systems, such as cross-lingual spoken document retrieval (Meng & Hui, 2001), and especially machine translation (MT) systems. For example, MT systems may be trained to automatically generate Chinese subti- tles for Cantonese television programs, as has been done for Scandinavian languages (Volk et al., 2010). 2 Previous Work Cantonese grammar has been well studied (Mat- thews & Yip, 1994; Cheung, 2007), and a few monolingual corpora for Cantonese have been compiled (Lee & Wong, 1998; Leung & Law, 2001; Wong, 2006). While the present corpus may also be used simply as Cantonese data, its primary contribution is as parallel data between Cantonese and Mandarin. The main difference …

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