Sinhala Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion and Rules for Schwa Epenthesis

This paper describes an architecture to convert Sinhala Unicode text into phonemic specification of pronunciation. The study was mainly focused on disambiguating schwa-/\/ and /a/ vowel epenthesis for consonants, which is one of the significant problems found in Sinhala. This problem has been addressed by formulating a set of rules. The proposed set of rules was tested using 30,000 distinct words obtained from a corpus and com-pared with the same words manually transcribed to phonemes by an expert. The Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) con-version model achieves 98 % accuracy.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Asanka Wasala, Ruvan Weerasinghe, Kumudu Gamage
• Keywords: ACL 2006, ACL 2007, Phonemic Specification, Sinhala Unicode Text, Vowel Epenthesis