Mandarin Humorous Homophone Recognition and Disambiguation in Automatic Speech Recognition

Abstract

Mandarin homophones remain a key challenge to improving automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy due to the amount of potential homophones. Mandarin speakers use this feature casually to convey emotions such as humour. Recent homophone-aware ASR studies have improved recognition accuracy, but intentional homophone twists in speech remain underexplored. In this paper, we identify patterns of homophone-based rhetorical wordplay in Mandarin, referred to as HumourPhone, and propose an ASR Adapter for homophone and HumourPhone recovery. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the recall of recognising HumourPhone by over 5\% and achieves a 4.35\% drop in target-span character error rate for homophone correction compared to baseline. These results highlight the need for homophone-aware modelling of lexical ambiguity and rhetorical wordplay in Mandarin speech recognition.