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Building a Pronunciation Dictionary for the Kabyle Language

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Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2019)

Abstract

This paper presents the methods used and results obtained for the creation of a Festival-compatible pronunciation dictionary of above 10k words for the kabyle language. Kabyle is a berber dialect spoken in Northern Algeria. This dictionary will be useful in the design of text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition systems for the kabyle language. It was built using a bootstrapping method in which we incrementally build rules to predict word pronunciations while correcting wrong predictions. We thus obtain a large pronunciation dictionary as well as a set of rules to predict pronunciations for unknown words. The rules are embedded in Classification and Regression Trees and achieve 91,62% of correct prediction rate for entire words and 97,85% for phonemes.

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Correspondence to Demri Lyes .

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Lyes, D., Leila, F., Hocine, T. (2019). Building a Pronunciation Dictionary for the Kabyle Language. In: Salah, A., Karpov, A., Potapova, R. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11658. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26061-3_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26061-3_32

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26060-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26061-3

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