ASR · 20% of the score · every entrant
Transcribing Hong Kong Cantonese: six tones, constant English code-switching, insurance vocabulary, and callers who are frightened or angry.
Cantonese carries six lexical tones. A tone error does not degrade a word, it replaces it. Every tile below is the same syllable, si, and every one means something unrelated. Play them.
Pitch demonstration, synthesised from the Chao values shown. Not a recording of speech — the point is the shape, not the voice.
低升調對低平調。喺一通銷售電話入面，聽錯呢個就係調轉咗邊個做緊乜。
高升調對中平調。保險係一份保單，報險係就住張單去索償。同一通電話入面兩個字都會不停出現。
高平調對低平調。一通索償電話入面，醫院用語同逐個唸出嚟嘅數字一樣咁密，所以呢一對錯落金額度同錯落診斷度一樣咁易。
Substitutions plus deletions plus insertions, over reference characters. Corpus-level, weighted by length. Cantonese has no word boundaries, so Word Error Rate would be meaningless here.
The same measure, but Latin runs count as whole words. Without it, misreading one English word costs four errors while misreading a Chinese word costs one, and every code-switching system is punished for the wrong thing.