[RoadMap] development plan for Chinese inverse text normalization

[Xingchen Song(宋星辰)]

Project Explanations:

• Following NeMo's (1) classification + (2) verbalization two-stage method, we plan to adapt jiayu's ITN grammar to this two-stage pipeline (for more details, plz see this paper).

• The reasons why we choose to separate Chinese ITN into two stages (each stage has its own WFST) rather than transduce input text using a single WFST:

  1. WFSTs can only process input linearly, but the word order can change from spoken to written form (i.e. 三分之一 -> 1/3)
  2. English ITN grammars, which has been carefully designed in NeMo, can be seamlessly integrated into this project

[Xingchen Song(宋星辰)]

Road Map:

• Design semiotic-class for Chinese
• Update Chinese ITN grammars from single-stage to two-stage
• Simplify ITN related code of Sparrowhawk(C++) and migrate it to WeNet runtime

[Binbin Zhang]

危楼高百尺，手可摘星辰。不敢高声语，恐惊天上人。
Seems great, I will learn the basic ideas at first.

[Xingchen Song(宋星辰)]

semiotic classes:

category	sub-category	example
number	int	三十一 ==> 31
	float	三十一点五七一 ==> 31.571
	serial	一一一二二二三三三 ==> 111222333
	telephone	加八六一八五四四一三九一二一 ==> [phone]
-	-	-
electronic	IP	二幺九点二二三点幺八四点二五二 ==> 219.223.184.252
	email	xyx艾特gmail点com ==> [e-mail]
	url	xyx点com ==> xyz.com
-	-	-
fraction	fraction	三分之一点二 ==> 1.2/3
-	-	-
percent	percent	百分之二点五 ==> 2.5%
-	-	-
measure	measure	五点五美元 ==> 5.5$
-	-	-
date	date	二零二一年三月四日 ==> 2021年3月4日
-	-	-
time	time	下午三点十五分 ==> 3:15 pm