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NB Uttale: A Norwegian Pronunciation Lexicon with Dialect Variation

We present a Norwegian pronunciation lexicon with Bokmål orthographic word forms and up to eight alternate phonological transcriptions per word form. The lexicon covers dialectal variations for five geographical areas, as well as pronunciation variations for spontaneous and manuscript-read speech. It is based on the NST Bokmål lexicon for East Norwegian, whose original phonological transcriptions have been corrected, before they were converted with dialect specific regular expression rules. To evaluate the quality and consistency of the new, rule-generated transcriptions, we trained grapheme-to phoneme (G2P) models and report our results with word- (WER) and phoneme-error-rate (PER) metrics. We found that the G2P models trained on lexica for Southwest and West Norwegian close-to written transcriptions have the lowest WER scores, and that all error-corrected, close-to-written lexica yield better WER scores than the original NST lexicon. The lexicon is available under an open license, and can be used for various language technology applications and in linguistic research.