Claire Li

Timothy Wong, Claire Li, Sam Lam et al.

This paper reports our work on building up a Cantonese Speech-to-Text (STT) system with a syllable based acoustic model. This is a part of an effort in building a STT system to aid dyslexic students who have cognitive deficiency in writing skills but have no problem expressing their ideas through speech. For Cantonese speech recognition, the basic unit of acoustic models can either be the conventional Initial-Final (IF) syllables, or the Onset-Nucleus-Coda (ONC) syllables where finals are further split into nucleus and coda to reflect the intra-syllable variations in Cantonese. By using the Kaldi toolkit, our system is trained using the stochastic gradient descent optimization model with the aid of GPUs for the hybrid Deep Neural Network and Hidden Markov Model (DNN-HMM) with and without I-vector based speaker adaptive training technique. The input features of the same Gaussian Mixture Model with speaker adaptive training (GMM-SAT) to DNN are used in all cases. Experiments show that the ONC-based syllable acoustic modeling with I-vector based DNN-HMM achieves the best performance with the word error rate (WER) of 9.66% and the real time factor (RTF) of 1.38812.

Claire Li, David Freeborn

This study explores how AI-powered digital innovations are reshaping organisational accountability in a transnational governance context. As AI systems increasingly mediate decision-making in domains such as auditing and financial reporting, traditional mechanisms of accountability, based on control, transparency, and auditability, are being destabilised. We integrate the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and institutional theory to examine how organisations adopt AI technologies in response to regulatory, ethical, and cultural pressures that transcend national boundaries. We argue that accountability is co-constructed within global socio-technical networks, shaped not only by user perceptions but also by governance logics and normative expectations. Extending TAM, we incorporate compliance and legitimacy as key factors in perceived usefulness and usability. Drawing on ANT, we reconceptualise accountability as a relational and emergent property of networked assemblages. We propose two organisational strategies including internal governance reconfiguration and external actor-network engagement to foster responsible, legitimate, and globally accepted AI adoption in the accounting domain.