LINGUIST List 6.1645

Wed Nov 22 1995

Sum: Machine Readable Dictionaries

Editor for this issue: T. Daniel Seely <dseelyemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Joe Pater, Machine Readable Dictionaries: Summary

Thanks to all who answered my query about machine readable
pronunciation dictionaries:
David Powers, Patrick Juola, Pete Whitelock, John Coleman,
Francois Yvon, Bruce Nevin, Richard Shillcock, Tony Vitale,
Jean-Louis Duchet, and Peter Daniels.

The answers contained many useful suggestions on paths I might
take to obtain copyright-free English pronunciation dictionaries:
most of these I have yet to follow up on, but I will post any further
results that might be of use.

By far the most oft-cited source was the Oxford Text Archive,
which contains copies of several machine-readable dictionaries.
The WWW URL is: http://info.ox.ac.uk/~archive/ota.html
The Oxford Text Archive Shortlist, which gives up to date brief
details of all texts held in the Archive can be obtained through e-mail
to ARCHIVEVAX.OXFORD.AC.UK, or by anonymous FTP
from the directory ota on ota.ox.ac.uk

Other Sources:

Patrick Juola writes:
"Grady Ward has a MOBY Pronunciator list available. About
80,000 words of English with an approximate IPA pronunciation
listed.
Research licence is about US $200, I think the commercial is double
that. Get it from gradynetcom.com"

Francois Yvon mentions:
"[o]ne [that] has been used in the NetTalk experiments and is
available. You can get more info on that corpus (including ftp
address) by mailing to:
neural-benchcs.cmu.edu"

As well as one available via ftp from:

host: ftp.cs.cmu.edu [128.2.206.173]
directory: project/fgdata/dict
 Retrieve the following files:

 README
 cmudict.0.2.Z (compressed)
 cmulex.0.1.Z (compressed)
 phoneset.0.1

Any other suggestions are still welcome.

Joe Pater,
paterjvqucdn.queensu.ca

P.S. For information on CHILDES, go to http://poppy.psy.cmu.edu
or consult MacWhinney, B. (1995) The Childes Project (2nd ed.), LEA.