rhdunn/cainteoir-engine — Issue #15: support parsing dictionary formats
Author: rhdunn
Created: 2011-11-23 20:27:05+00:00
State: open
Labels: reader-api, roadmap, tts

The document reader should have the ability to parse dictionary document formats and generate reader events for them. This should support:
* dictionary entries -- mapping (grapheme, language) to (pronunciation, phoneme-format, context/part-of-speech) or (say-as, context/part-of-speech);
* rule entries -- mapping (left, match, right, language) to (pronunciation, phoneme-format).

Where phoneme-format can be "ipa", "kirshenbaum", "ascii-ipa", "sampa", "x-sampa", "espeak", etc.

This should support the following (and other) dictionary formats:
* PLS (Pronunciation Lexicon Specification);
* eSpeak text;
* eSpeak binary;
* Cainteoir Dictionary Format;
* CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) Pronouncing Dictionary (low priority);
* OALED electronic dictionary (low priority).

This allows tools to be built on top of this support. For example:
* pronunciation verification -- simplifying tests/dictionary.py;
* loading user dictionaries into the engine when running;
* loading document dictionaries into the engine (e,g, ePub 3.0 with an embedded PLS document) before reading.