G2PIL: A Grapheme-To-Phoneme Conversion Tool for the Italian Language

Abstract

This paper presents a knowledge-based approach for the grapheme to-phoneme conversion (G2P) of isolated words of the Italian language. With more than 7,000 languages in the world, the biggest challenge today is to rapidly port speech processing systems to new languages with low human effort and at reasonable cost. This includes the creation of qualified pronunciation dictionaries. The dictionaries provide the mapping from the orthographic form of a word to its pronunciation, which is useful in both speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems.For training the acoustic models we need an automatic routine that maps the spelling of training set to a string of phonetic symbols representing the pronunciation.