How do you pronounce your name? Improving G2P with transliterations

Aditya Bhargava and Grzegorz Kondrak
University of Alberta


Abstract

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (G2P) of names is an important and challenging problem. The correct pronunciation of a name is often reflected in its transliterations, which are expressed within a different phonological inventory. We investigate the problem of using transliterations to correct errors produced by state-of-the-art G2P systems. We present a novel re-ranking approach that incorporates a variety of score and n-gram features, in order to leverage transliterations from multiple languages. Our experiments demonstrate significant accuracy improvements when re-ranking is applied to n-best lists generated by three different G2P programs.




Full paper: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-1041.pdf