A Weighted Finite-State Transducer Implementation of Phoneme Rewrite Rules for English to Korean Pronunciation Conversion
Hahn Koo · Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences · 2011
Words change their phonetic as well as orthographic form when they are borrowed and used by speakers of another language. A formal model that properly captures this change has theoretical implications in phonology and practical applications in speech processing and machine transliteration. This paper describes a method for developing a finite- state model that predicts how English words and named entities are pronounced in Korean. The model predicts nativized pronunciation using weighted finite-state transducers implementing context-dependent phoneme rewrite rules derived from English-to-Korean pronunciation pairs and syllable phonotactics in Korean.