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Information Fusion
Volume 7, Issue 2, June 2006, Pages 207-220
 
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doi:10.1016/j.inffus.2004.08.002    How to Cite or Link Using DOI (Opens New Window)
Copyright © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Information fusion approaches to the automatic pronunciation of print by analogy

R.I. Dampera, b, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author and Y. Marchandb, c, E-mail The Corresponding Author

aImage, Speech and Intelligent Systems (ISIS) Research Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK bInstitute for Biodiagnostics (Atlantic), National Research Council Canada, Neuroimaging Research Laboratory, 1796 Summer Street, Suite 3900, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3A7 cFaculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 1W5

Received 29 March 2004; 
revised 5 August 2004; 
accepted 5 August 2004. 
Available online 11 September 2004.

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Abstract

Automatic pronunciation of words from their spelling alone is a hard computational problem, especially for languages like English and French where there is only a partially consistent mapping from letters to sound. Currently, the best known approach uses an inferential process of analogy with other words listed in a dictionary of spellings and corresponding pronunciations. However, the process produces multiple candidate pronunciations and little or no theory exists to guide the choice among them. Rather than committing to one specific heuristic scoring method, it may be preferable to use multiple strategies (i.e., soft experts) and then employ information fusion techniques to combine them to give a final result. In this paper, we compare four different fusion schemes, using three different dictionaries (with different codings for specifying the pronunciations) as the knowledge base for analogical reasoning. The four schemes are: fusion of raw scores; rank fusion using Borda counting; rank fusion using non-uniform values; and rank fusion using non-uniform values weighted by a measure of prior performance of the experts. All possible combinations of five different expert strategies are studied. Although all four fusion schemes outperformed the single best strategy, results show clear superiority of rank fusion over the other methods.

Keywords: Score fusion; Rank fusion; Automatic pronunciation; Analogical reasoning; Speech synthesis

Article Outline

1. Introduction
2. The problem of automatic pronunciation of print
3. Letter–phoneme alignment
4. Principles of pronunciation by analogy
4.1. Pattern matching
4.2. Pronunciation lattice
4.3. Decision function
5. Dictionaries
5.1. Teachers Word Book
5.2. Webster’s Pocket Dictionary
5.3. British English Example Pronunciations
5.4. Distribution of word lengths
6. Combining multiple scoring strategies
6.1. Pronunciation candidates
6.2. Scoring strategies
6.3. Fusion methods
6.3.1. Fusion of raw scores
6.3.2. Rank fusion based on Borda counting
6.3.3. Rank fusion based on non-uniform values
6.3.4. Rank fusion based on non-uniform values weighted by prior behavior
7. Results
7.1. Results for fusion of raw scores
7.2. Results for rank fusion based on Borda counting
7.3. Results for rank fusion with non-uniform values
7.4. Results for rank fusion with non-uniform weighted values
8. Discussion and conclusions
References



Information Fusion
Volume 7, Issue 2, June 2006, Pages 207-220
 
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