New strategies for pronunciation by analogy

The synthesis quality is influenced by many important factors, among which the correctness of the grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) conversion is one of the crucial ones. Automatic letter-to-sound systems have been in the center of attention for the last decade. One of the most effective and promising methods resulted to be the so-called ldquopronunciation by analogyrdquo method, based on the analogy in the grapheme context, allowing derivation of the correct pronunciation for a new word from the parts of similar words present in the dictionary. This paper aims at further development of this method. Novel scoring strategies for determining the best pronunciations were proposed. A word error rate reduction of 1.5-2.5 percent is obtained. A detailed analysis shows that one of the new strategies consistently outperforms the others. The results obtained are compared to other g2p methods using the same data.