Basis Identification for Automatic Creation of Pronunciation Lexicon for Proper Names

Abstract

Development of a proper names pronunciation lexicon is usually a manual effort which can not be avoided. Grapheme to phoneme (G2P) conversion modules, in literature, are usually rule based and work best for non-proper names in a particular language. Proper names are foreign to a G2P module. We follow an optimization approach to enable automatic construction of proper names pronunciation lexicon. The idea is to construct a small orthogonal set of words (basis) which can span the set of names in a given database. We propose two algorithms for the construction of this basis. The transcription lexicon of all the proper names in a database can be produced by the manual transcription of only the small set of basis words. We first construct a cost function and show that the minimization of the cost function results in a basis. We derive conditions for convergence of this cost function and validate them experimentally on a very large proper name database. Experiments show the transcription can be achieved by transcribing a set of small number of basis words. The algorithms proposed are generic and independent of language; however performance is better if the proper names have same origin, namely, same language or geographical region.