Automatic generation of Korean pronunciation variants by multistage applications of phonological rules

Phonetic transcriptions are often manually encoded in a pronunciation lexicon. This process is time consuming and requires linguistic expertise. Moreover, it is very difficult to maintain consistency. To handle these problems, we present a model that produces Korean pronunciation variants based on morphophonological analysis. By analyzing phonological variations frequently found in spoken Korean, we have derived about 800 phonemic contexts that would trigger the applications of the corresponding phonemic and allophonic rules. In generating pronunciation variants, morphological analysis is preceded to handle variations of phonological words. According to the morphological category, a set of finite state automata tables reflecting phonemic context is looked up to generate pronunciation variants. Our experiments show that the proposed model produces mostly correct pronunciation variants of phonological words consisting of several morphemes.