Development of a phoneme-to-phoneme (p2p) converter to improve the grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) conversion of names
Qian Yang, Jean‐Pierre Martens, Nanneke Konings, Henk van den Heuvel · 2006
It is acknowledged that a good phonemic transcription of proper names is imperative for the success of many modern speech-based services such as directory assistance, car navigation, etc.It is also known that state-of-the-art general-purpose grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) converters perform rather poorly on many name categories.This paper proposes to use a g2p-p2p tandem comprising a state-ofthe-art general-purpose g2p converter that produces an initial transcription and a name category specific phoneme-to-phoneme (p2p) converter that aims at correcting the mistakes made by the g2p converter.The main body of the paper describes a novel methodology for the automatic construction of the p2p converter.The methodology is implemented in a software toolbox that will be made publicly available in a form that will permit the user to design a p2p converter for an arbitrary name category.To give a proof of concept, the toolbox was used for the development of three p2p converters for first names, surnames and geographical names respectively.The obtained systems are small (few rules) and effective: significant improvements (up to 50% relative) of the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion are obtained.These encouraging results call for a further development and improvement of the approach.1 Has recently moved to Nuance