Acquiring Pronunciation Data for a Placenames Lexicon in a Less-Resourced Language

A new procedure is described for generating pronunciations for a dictionary of place-names in a less-resourced language (Welsh, spoken in Wales, UK). The method is suitable for use in a situation where there is a lack of skilled phoneticians with expertise in the language, but where there are native speakers available, as well as a text-to-speech synthesiser for the language. The lack of skilled phoneticians will make it impossible to carry out direct editing of pronunciations, and so a method has been devised that makes it possible for non-phonetician native speakers to edit pronunciations without knowledge of the phonology of the language. The key advance in this method is the use of "re-spelling" to indicate pronunciation in a linguistically-na

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Briony Williams, Rhys James Jones
• Keywords: Education, LREC 2008, Native Speaker, Native Speaker Editor, Skilled Phoneticians