Grapheme-to-phoneme transcription for French

A programming language designed for the simple description of letter-to-sound rules is described. Its use in an application of grapheme-to-phoneme transformation rules system for French is studied, and some results are given. The rules system is based on the application of a partially ordered set of phonological rules. The left-hand side of each rule indicates the graphemes involved by the rule. The right-hand side of each rule specifies the corresponding phonemes and possibly the preceding and succeeding graphemic context. The context-sensitive rules are processed in such a way that the rules related to exceptional pronunciations are first examined in the set. The last examined rules are the more general ones. Additional rules have been implemented to deal with the problem of mute "e", liaisons, linkings and numbers written as numerals. This program has been designed primarily to serve as a flexible research tool. The set of rules can be easily defined, revised and expanded.