The researchers of Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IACAS) said that our Chinese scientists have developed a computer program to test how well people speak Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin, which in Chinese is called Putonghua and literally means "common talk", is taught in every school in the country and is China's standard lingua franca.

Nowadays, the number of people learning Putonghua is rapidly increasing. However, the existing test system still adopts the subjective test method, which is inevitable to have some limitations in efficiency and veracity. Our new technology emerged just in this situation. It aims to improve oral testing of Chinese and promote Mandarin Chinese both at home and abroad.

The technology was jointly developed by IACAS and Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Lab experiments show that more than 98 percent of the results given by the computer evaluation system were as same as the results given by linguists, said Ju Qi, deputy director of IACAS. She also said that the large-scale Mandarin Chinese examination brought forward more requests to the automatic pronunciation evaluation engine. In order to meet this demand, the ThinkIT Speech Laboratory put forward the creative calculation method based on its advanced sound recognition technology and unique discourse analysis method. After breaking many technical difficulties, it successfully researched and developed this automatic evaluation engine.　

It is said the new system could greatly lighten the workload of human and effectively solved the problem of large-scale gathering for paper examination, which will help to lower down the costs of examination. The system will be introduced to Mandarin Chinese examinations in Hong Kong's middle schools and universities. And later it will be widely launched on the market both home and abroad.