A Rule-Based Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion System

Abstract

This article presents a rule-based grapheme-to-phoneme conversion method and algorithm for Polish. It should be noted that the fundamental grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules have been developed by Maria Steffen-Batóg and presented in her set of monographs dedicated to the automatic grapheme-to-phoneme conversion of texts in Polish. The author used previously developed rules and independently developed the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion algorithm.The algorithm has been implemented as a software application called TransFon, which allows the user to convert any text in Polish orthography to corresponding strings of phonemes, in phonemic transcription. Using TransFon, a phonemic Polish language corpus was created out of an orthographic corpus. The phonemic language corpusallows statistical analysis of the Polish language, as well as the development of phoneme- and word-based language models for automatic speech recognition using statistical methods. The developed phonemic language corpus opens up further opportunities for research to improve automatic speech recognition in Polish. The development of statistical methods for speech recognition and language modelling requires access to large language corpora, including phonemic corpora. The method presented here enables the creation of such corpora.