Comparing direct G2P with G2P followed by accent conversion when determining pronunciations for South African English

It has been shown that techniques known as grapheme-and-phoneme-to-phoneme (GP2P) conversion can be used to derive pronunciations in a poorly-resourced accent, such as South African English, using available pronunciations in better-resourced accents of the same language, such as British and American English. However if the pronunciation is not available in either accent, it must be obtained using graphemeto-phoneme (G2P) conversion in either the source or the target accent. The question therefore arises whether it is better to apply G2P in the source accent and then GP2P to obtain the desired pronunciation in the target accent, or to apply G2P directly to the target accent. This study finds that if the source dictionary used has a high G2P accuracy (due to the dictionary’s size, regularity, or both), it is advantageous to generate a pronunciation in the source accent first using G2P, and subsequently convert this pronunciation to the target accent.