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Incorporating Syllable Phonotactics to Improve Grapheme to Phoneme Translation

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Future and Emerging Trends in Language Technology. Machine Learning and Big Data (FETLT 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10341))

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Abstract

Grapheme to Phoneme (G2P) translation is a critical step in many natural language tasks such as text-to-speech production and automatic speech recognition. Most approaches to the G2P problem ignore phonotactical constraints and syllable structure information, and they rely on simple letter window features to produce pronunciations of words. We present a G2P translator which incorporates syllable structure into the prediction pipeline during structured prediction and re-ranking. In addition, most dictionaries contain only word-to-pronunciation pairs, which is a problem when trying to use these dictionaries as training data in a structured prediction approach to G2P translation. We present a number of improvements to the process of producing high-quality alignments of these pairs for training data. Together these two contributions improve the G2P word error rate (WER) on the CMUDict dataset by ~8%, achieving a new state-of-the-art accuracy level among open-source solutions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

    Stephen Ash

  2. Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA

    David Lin

Authors
  1. Stephen Ash
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  2. David Lin
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Correspondence to Stephen Ash .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Seville , Sevilla, Spain

    José F Quesada

  2. University of Seville , Seville, Spain

    Francisco-Jesús Martín Mateos

  3. University of Seville , Seville, Spain

    Teresa López Soto

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Ash, S., Lin, D. (2017). Incorporating Syllable Phonotactics to Improve Grapheme to Phoneme Translation. In: Quesada, J., Martín Mateos , FJ., López Soto, T. (eds) Future and Emerging Trends in Language Technology. Machine Learning and Big Data. FETLT 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10341. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69365-1_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69365-1_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69364-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69365-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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