An MDL-based approach to extracting subword units for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion

We address a key problem in grapheme-tophoneme conversion: the ambiguity in mapping grapheme units to phonemes. Rather than using single letters and phonemes as units, we propose learning chunks, or subwords, to reduce ambiguity. This can be interpreted as learning a lexicon of subwords that has minimum description length. We implement an algorithm to build such a lexicon, as well as a simple decoder that uses these subwords.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Sravana Reddy, John A. Goldsmith
• Keywords: Computational Linguistics, Grapheme Units, NAACL 2010, Phonemes, Single Letters