Bob: A lexicon and pronunciation dictionary generator

This paper presents Bob, a tool for managing lexicons and generating pronunciation dictionaries for automatic speech recognition systems. It aims to maintain a high level of consistency between lexicons and language modelling corpora by managing the text normalisation and lexicon generation processes in a single dedicated package. It also aims to maintain consistent pronunciation dictionaries by generating pronunciation hypotheses automatically and aiding their verification. The tool´s design and functionality are described. Also two case studies highlighting the importance of consistency and illustrating the use of the tool are reported.