Language processing for name and address reading in Hungarian

Name and address reading is an important combined application area of language processing and text-to-speech (TTS) systems. It is the cornerstone of both traditional reverse directory telephone services and new, location based, traffic and tour guide applications. The language processing aspects of a solution for Hungarian is described. The work was based on the analysis of a subscriber database containing about 3 million records (there are about 10 million Hungarian citizens). Categories of name and address elements were defined. A program for the automatic classification of database records was developed. Statistical parameters were derived about proper/legal names and addresses. Based on these results text corpora for enriching the TTS acoustic database were designed. Reading strategies and related special algorithms and tables were developed for the description of complex name categories. Our results may be applied for similar tasks of other languages with comparable linguistic and statistical features.