A language-independent, data-oriented architecture for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion

We report on an implemented grapheme to phoneme conversion architecture Given a set of examples spelling words with their associated phonetic represen tation 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 pro duces as its output the phonetic transcription according to the rules implicit in the training data This paper describes the architecture and focuses on our solution to the alignment problem given the spelling and the phonetic trancription of a word often di ering in length these two representations have to be aligned in such a way that grapheme symbols or strings of grapheme symbols are consistently asso ciated with the same phonetic symbol If this alignment has to be done by hand it is extremely labour intensive