Patent ID: 7606710

Claim:
A method for text-to-pronunciation conversion in a text-to-pronunciation conversion system, comprising: a chunk searching process performed in said text-to-pronunciation conversion system for finding a set of possible chunks via a trained pronouncing dictionary, a chunk being defined as a sequence of grapheme-phoneme pairs; a grapheme segmentation process performed in said text-to-pronunciation conversion system for generating a grapheme sequence from an input text; a chunk sequence marking process performed in said text-to-pronunciation conversion system for generating candidate chunk sequences of said input text from said grapheme sequence and said set of possible chunks; and a decision process performed in said text-to-pronunciation conversion system for determining a pronouncing sequence for said input text by scoring said candidate chunk sequences of said input text; wherein said decision process further includes a re-verifying process for a phoneme sequence by re-scoring said candidate chunk sequences according to characteristic combination of intra chunks and inter chunks.