Fourth ISCA ITRW on Speech Synthesis August 29 - September 1, 2001 Perthshire, Scotland

Bi-directional Conversion Between Graphemes and Phonemes Using a Joint N-gram Model

Lucian Galescu and James F. Allen

Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, NY, USA

We present in this paper a statistical model for language-independent bi-directional conversion between spelling and pronunciation, based on joint grapheme/phoneme units extracted from automatically aligned data. The model is evaluated on spelling-to-pronunciation and pronunciation-to-spelling conversion on the NetTalk database and the CMU dictionary. We also study the effect of including lexical stress in the pronunciation. Although a direct comparison is difficult to make, our model's performance appears to be as good or better than that of other data-driven approaches that have been applied to the same tasks.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Galescu, Lucian / Allen, James F. (2001): "Bi-directional conversion between graphemes and phonemes using a joint N-gram model", In SSW4-2001, paper 131.