Info and questions about text corpora

Sam Raker | 19 Jun 2012 20:23

Automatic IPA transcription

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone has found a good (OSX/*NIX-compatible) program for automatic transcription (of
English) to IPA. There are a few websites that offer to do it, but I'd prefer something I could plug in to a
python program, if possible.

Thanks,
-Sam

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Angus B. Grieve-Smith | 19 Jun 2012 22:57

Re: Automatic IPA transcription

On 06/19/2012 02:23 PM, Sam Raker wrote:
> Hello,
> I was wondering if anyone has found a good (OSX/*NIX-compatible) program for automatic transcription
(of English) to IPA. There are a few websites that offer to do it, but I'd prefer something I could plug in to a
python program, if possible.

     Really?  Do these websites allow you to choose the accent, 
register, level of intoxication, etc?  Funny things that people come up 
with these days.

--

-- 
Angus B. Grieve-Smith
grvsmth <at> panix.com

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Christian Pietsch | 20 Jun 2012 21:17

Re: Automatic IPA transcription

Hi Sam,

I assume you have English text, not speech. Then what you need is a
grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) converter. You will find them as components
of text-to-speech (TTS) systems. For English text, you could use
eSpeak or Festival, both of which are easily obtainable, e.g. as
Debian or Ubuntu Linux packages. Here is something I tried:

$ echo 'Will you pronounce this correctly?' | espeak -v en -x -q 
--> wIl ju: pr <at> n'aUns DIs k <at> r'Ektli

The output you can see here is what eSpeak calls “phoneme mnemonics”,
but I guess it is X-SAMPA which is an ASCII representation of IPA. For
a mapping table and code in several programming languages, including
Python, see Henrik Theiling's IPA site <http://www.theiling.de/ipa/>.
Using his cxs.py module and CXS.def lookup table, I get this result:
--> wɪl juː prənˈaʊns ðɪs kərˈɛktli

Looks OK to me.

Instead of using parts of a full TTS system, you can also use
stand-alone G2P tools such as Sequitur G2P or Phonetisaurus, but you
might have to train them first.

Hope this helps,
Christian

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 02:23:30PM -0400, Sam Raker wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone has found a good (OSX/*NIX-compatible)
> program for automatic transcription (of English) to IPA. There are a

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