Letter-Phoneme Alignment: An Exploration

Letter-phoneme alignment is usually generated by a straightforward application of the EM algorithm. We explore several alternative alignment methods that employ phonetics, integer programming, and sets of constraints, and propose a novel approach of refining the EM alignment by aggregation of best alignments. We perform both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of the assortment of methods. We show that our proposed EM-Aggregation algorithm leads to the improvement of the state of the art in letter-to-phoneme conversion on several different data sets.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Sittichai Jiampojamarn, Grzegorz Kondrak
• Keywords: ACL 2010, Alternative Alignment, Computational Linguistics, EM Alignment, Letter-phoneme Alignment