LINGUIST List 12.2886

Sat Nov 17 2001

FYI: LSA October Bulletin, Proper Names Online

Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. LSA, October Bulletin
2. Ariadna Font Llitjos, pronunciation of proper names online

The October LSA Bulletin is now available at http://www.lsadc.org

Dear list members,

I'm currently working on putting together a web page which will allow
you to type in your name (or any other proper name you're interested
in) and will give you its phonetic transcription and an audio file with
the name synthesized according to:
	- the CMU dictionary (if it's in there), and 
	- two sets of letter-to-sound rules:
		- an ngram-based one, and 
		- one incorporating language origin (my masters thesis)

We will ask you to then listen to the audio files and determine which one
is the correct or most acceptable one. If none is acceptable, you can
choose to enter the correct phonetic transcription and it will generate
the audio file so that you can listen to it and confirm this is the right
pronunciation.

This way, we hope to effectively perform human evaluation of our
pronunciation models online, as well as to gather proper name
pronunciations and statistics on these pronunciations.

The idea is to make this proper name pronunciation database available once
we gather enough information for it to be useful.

As soon as I get this page up and running and will send another message to
this list, so that you can try it out and send any feedback and comments
you might have.

Have a nice day.

Ariadna

	Ariadna Font Llitjos
 	Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University
 	4533 Newell Simon Hall 		 5000 Forbes Ave. 
	phone (412) 268-9515		 Pittsburgh, PA 15213

 	aria+cs.cmu.edu		 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aria