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FonBund: A Library for Combining Cross-lingual Phonological Segment Data

We present an open-source library (FonBund) that provides a way of mapping sequences of arbitrary phonetic segments in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) into multiple articulatory feature representations. The library interfaces with several existing linguistic typology resources providing phonological segment inventories and their corresponding articulatory feature systems. Our first goal was to facilitate the derivation of articulatory features without giving a special preference to any particular phonological segment inventory provided by freely available linguistic typology resources. The second goal was to build a very light-weight library that can be easily modified to support new phonological segment inventories. In order to support IPA segments that do not occur in the freely available resources, the library provides a simple configuration language for performing segment rewrites and adding custom segments with the corresponding feature structures. In addition to introducing the library and the corresponding linguistic resources, we also describe some of the practical uses of this library (multilingual speech synthesis) in the hope that this software will help facilitate multilingual speech research.