International Phoneticizing Engine Technology through Language Independent Lexical Acquisition

One result of the trend towards globalization is an increased number of projects that focus on natural language processing. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies, for example, hold great promise in facilitating global communications and collaborations. Unfortunately, to date, most research projects focus on single widely spoken languages. Therefore, the cost to adapt a particular ASR tool for use with other languages is often prohibitive. This work takes a more general approach. We propose an international phoneticizing engine (IPE) that interprets input files supplied in our Phonetic Language Identity (PLI) format to build a dictionary. IPE is language independent and rule based. It operates by decomposing the dictionary creation process into a set of well-defined steps. These steps reduce rule conflicts, allow for rule creation by people without linguistics training, and optimize run-time efficiency. Dictionaries created by the IPE can be used with the speech recognition system. IPE defines an easy-to-use systematic approach that can lead to internationalization of automatic speech recognition systems.