Bootstrapping pronunciation dictionaries: practical issues

Abstract

Bootstrapping techniques are an efficient way to develop electronic pronunciation dictionaries, but require fast system response to be practical for medium-to-large lexicons. In addition, user errors are inevitable during this process, and it is useful if automatic means can be used to assist in the search for such errors. We describe how the Default&Refine grapheme-to-phoneme rule extraction algorithm can be adapted to meet both of these goals. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of these methods.