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


Abstract
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-of-the-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.
Anthology ID:
L06-1139
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/248_pdf.pdf
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Cite (ACL):
Qian Yang, Jean-Pierre Martens, Nanneke Konings, and Henk van den Heuvel. 2006. Development of a phoneme-to-phoneme (p2p) converter to improve the grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) conversion of names. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Development of a phoneme-to-phoneme (p2p) converter to improve the grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) conversion of names (Yang et al., LREC 2006)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/248_pdf.pdf