Patent ID: 6363342
Filing Date: 2002-03-26
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
A system for developing word-pronunciation pairs based on a spelled word input, comprising:a transcription generator receptive of the spelled word input for generating a phonetic transcription that corresponds to the spelled word input, said phonetic transcription being segmented into syllabic portions; a phoneticizer receptive of the spelled word input for producing a plurality of scored phonetic transcriptions, where the phoneticizer employs letter-only decision trees and phoneme-mixed decision trees to produce said plurality of scored phonetic transcriptions, the letter-only decision trees having nodes representing questions about a given letter and neighboring letters in the spelled word input and the phoneme-mixed decision trees having nodes representing questions about a phoneme and neighboring phonemes in the spelled word input; a phonemic editor connected to said transcription generator for displaying and editing syllabic portions of said phonetic transcription and connected to said phoneticizer for displaying said plurality of scored phonetic transcriptions; and a storage mechanism for updating a lexicon with the spelled word input and said phonetic transcription, thereby developing the desired word-pronunciation pair.