Orthographic Transcription: which enrichment is required for phonetization?

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of the enrichment of transcriptions in the perspective of an automatic phonetization. Phonetization is the process of representing sounds with phonetic signs. There are two general ways to construct a phonetization process: rule based systems (with rules based on inference approaches or proposed by expert linguists) and dictionary based solutions which consist in storing a maximum of phonological knowledge in a lexicon. In both cases, phonetization is based on a manual transcription. Such a transcription is established on the basis of conventions that can differ depending on their working out context. This present study focuses on three different enrichments of such a transcription. Evaluations compare phonetizations obtained from automatic systems to a reference phonetized manually. The test corpus is made of three types of speech: conversational speech, read speech and political debate. A specific algorithm for the rule-based system is proposed to deal with enrichments. The final system obtained a phonetization of about 95.2% correct (from 3.7% to 5.6% error rates depending on the corpus).

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