A Language-Independent, Data-Oriented Architecture for Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion
Walter M. P. Daelemans, Antal van den Bosch · 1994
We report on an implemented grapheme-to-phoneme conversion architecture. Given a set of examples (spelling words with their associated phonetic representation) in a language, a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion system is automatically produced for that language which takes as its input the spelling of words, and produces as its output the phonetic transcription according to the rules implicit in the training data. This paper describes the architecture and focuses on our solution to the alignment problem: given the spelling and the phonetic trancription of a word (often differing in length), these two representations have to be aligned in such a way that grapheme symbols or strings of grapheme symbols are consistently associated with the same phonetic symbol. If this alignment has to be done by hand, it is extremely labour-intensive. 1 Introduction Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion is an essential module in any text-to-speech system. Various language-specific sources of linguistic knowledge ...