Normalization of Ukrainian letters, numerals, and measures for natural language processing

Abstract

Abstract There is still little linguistic data on the Ukrainian language in the context of natural language processing (NLP). At the same time, in view of real perspectives of European integration of Ukraine, its state language will soon probably become one of the European Community languages. This fact draws more and more interest to the possible inclusion of the Ukrainian language in multilingual NLP scenarios. This article aims to provide some important data that are necessary for text-to-speech (TTS) conversion of the Ukrainian language. Relying on Ukrainian phonetics and grammar, we formulate the basic rules governing the normalization of Ukrainian letters, numerals, and measures, which help obtain Ukrainian speech data. The results are presented in tables and strings convenient for coding and further implementation into linguistic tools. These rules are necessary for the TTS tasks arising in various NLP tasks associated with speech synthesis, machine translation, information retrieval, etc.