Language-independent Data-oriented Grapheme-to-phoneme Conversion

We describe an approach to grapheme-to-phoneme conversion which is both language-independent and data-oriented. 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. We describe the design of the system, and compare its performance to knowledge-based and alternative data-oriented approaches.