A pronunciation-by-analogy module for the Festival Text-to-Speech Synthesiser

Pronunciation by analogy (PbA) is a data-driven technique for the automatic phonemisation of text which is receiving renewed attention from workers in text-to-speech synthesis. It uses the dictionary which provides the primary source of pronunciations via direct look-up as a secondary source of information about the pronunciation of unknown words. In this paper, we provide theoretical and empirical motivations for the use of PbA, review approaches to automatic pronunciation generation by analogy, and report on the implementation of a PbA module for the Festival text-to-speech synthesiser. We have used a much larger dictionary (British English Example Pronunciation or BEEP, approximately 200,000 words) than hitherto. New results of 86.7% words correct are obtained for this dictionary on our best-performing PbA implementation. The Festival PbA module is still under development, however, and currently does less well.