Bartlett et al., ACL-HLT 2008. Automatic Syllabification with Structured SVMs for Letter-to-Phoneme Conversion
Citation
Susan Bartlett, Grzegorz Kondrak and Colin Cherry. 2008. Automatic syllabification with structured SVMs for letter-to-phoneme conversion. In Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, 2008, pp. 568–576.
Online Version
Automatic syllabification with structured SVMs for letter-to-phoneme conversion.
Summary
This paper describes one of the first successful attempts at integrating automatic syllabification into a letter-to-phoneme conversion system using structured SVMs. The authors obtain substantial improvements in reducing automatic syllabification error rate (measured in WER) against the then state-of-the-art approach. The authors model the problem as an orthographic syllabification task as opposed to phonological syllabification. They treat it as a sequence tagging problem and define new tagging schemes. The method is applied to languages such as German and Dutch, in addition to English.