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Abbreviations pronunciation

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2011-05-11
2012-09-22
  • Amin Yazdani

    Amin Yazdani - 2011-05-11

    Hey all,

    I have problems with some pronunciations for abbreviations.
    For example for NSERC the pronunciation produced is N S AH R K but it should
    be EH N S AH R K or something like that.

    So, my question is how does sphinx handle abbreviations? How can I fix this
    problem?
    Any suggestion or solutions?

    Bests,
    Amin

     
  • Nickolay V. Shmyrev

    Hello

    NSERC the pronunciation produced is N S AH R K

    Sorry, what exactly do you use to produce pronunciation for this word? A web
    service?

    So, my question is how does sphinx handle abbreviations?

    Not sure what do you mean by "handle". You can add abbreviation to the
    dictionary as any other word

    How can I fix this problem?

    Is there a problem to solve?

     
  • Amin Yazdani

    Amin Yazdani - 2011-05-11

    Maybe I wasn't clear enough.

    I've used lmtool (online one) for producing N S AH R K

    Here is the problem:
    There are abbreviations that "speaker" may use in his/her "speech", such as
    NSERC. In order to be able to recognize those words (NSERC), they should be
    paired with a pronunciation (EH N S EH R K) n the .dic file.
    Is there any tool for producing the correct pronunciations for abbreviations?

    Another abbreviation that one can think of is SFU. which should be EH S EH F
    YU

    Am I clear enough?

     
  • Nickolay V. Shmyrev

    Hello

    Online lmtool which uses pronounce is very limited. There must be a
    preprocessing step before it or actually it's way better to use more advanced
    tools. Consider

    Karl IV
    1000 miles
    NBC

    Those all are words which require tokenization. In practice this job is done
    by TTS engine, for example FreeTTS or OpenMARY which has all required code to
    do that properly. We are planning to integrate engine by the end of the summer
    but this is just a plan. I agree this is a much needed functionality that we
    lack now.

     
  • Amin Yazdani

    Amin Yazdani - 2011-05-12

    Actually I have tried FreeTTS engine for this.

    They have a set of rules, like state machine, which they use to extract the
    pronunciation of each word, but the set of rules seems to be not
    complete/accurate enough.

    I looked at Festival as well, same problem there.

    The problem seems to be those being somehow out of date (may be not the
    engine, but the rule-sets)

     
  • Nickolay V. Shmyrev

    That's true. The problem is complex and there is even non-trivial research in
    this area, for example, for medical texts

    http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/737_Paper.pdf

    Since the problem of abbreviation detection is sort of external to ASR, it
    might help to ask somewhere in NLP community for the help. Maybe some more or
    less accurate toolkit for this task is available.

    I'll be also interested to find that out, if find have a link please share it
    here.

     

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