Extending an Afrikaans pronunciation dictionary using Dutch resources and P2P/GP2P

Abstract

In this study we explore the extension of a small Afrikaans pronunciation dictionary by applying phoneme-tophoneme (P2P) and grapheme-and-phoneme-to-phoneme (GP2P) conversion to an existing and more extensive Dutch pronunciation dictionary. This is compared to the more common approach of extending the Afrikaans dictionary by means of graphemeto-phoneme (G2P) conversion. The results indicate that the Afrikaans pronunciations obtained by P2P and GP2P from the Dutch dictionary are more accurate than the corresponding pronunciations obtained by the application of G2P. This result indicates that under-resourced languages can take advantage of existing and more extensive resources available in a closely-related and better-resourced language in order to improve the extent and quality of a pronunciation dictionary.