How to create a Malayalam Pronuciation Dictionary?

What is a phonetic lexicon? A pronunciation dictionary or a phonetic lexicon is a list of words and their pronunciation described as a sequence of phonemes. It is an essential component in the training and decoding of speech to text (STT) and text to speech (TTS) systems. A pronunciation dictionary is slightly different from a simple phonetic transcription. It should contain delimiters between phonemes, space is usually the default choice. [Read More]

Mlphon: A Multifunctional Grapheme-Phoneme Conversion Tool Using Finite State Transducers

The Mlphon tool I had been working on, for the past couple of years was extensively expanded as part of my research work at College of Engineering Trivandrum. A detailed presentation of the phonemic features of Malayalam, their incorporation as a sequential ruleset in the form of finite state transucers, a quantitative evaluation of the applications of the tool are now available in the article, published by the open access journal, IEEE Access. [Read More]

Malayalam Phonetic Analyser: Version 1.0.0

Edit (September 20,2022): A detailed report on this is now available as a journal article In the previous post, I had shared the work in progress version of a finite state transducer based Malaylam phonetic analyser. A phonetic analyser analyses the written form of the text to give the phonetic characteristics of the grapheme sequence. Understanding the phonetic characteristics of a word is helpful in many computational linguistic problems. For instance, translating a word into its phonetic representation is needed in the synthesis of a text to speech (TTS) system. [Read More]

FST based Malayalam Phonetic Analyser

Edit (September 20,2022): A detailed report on this is now available as a journal article What is a Phonetic analyser? ‘Phoneme’ is the fundamental unit in the the speech system of the language. ‘Grapheme’ is the fundamental unit in the writing system. From one or more graphemes a phoneme can be synthesized. A phonetic analyser analyses the written form of the text to give the phonetic characteristics of the grapheme sequence. [Read More]