Rule-based Korean Grapheme to Phoneme Conversion Using Sound Patterns

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion plays an important role in text-to-speech applications and other fields of computational linguistics. Although Korean uses a phonemic writing system, it must have a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for speech synthesis because Korean writing system does not always reflect its actual pronunciations. This paper describes a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion method based on sound patterns to convert Korean text strings into phonemic representations. In the experiment with Korean news broadcasting evaluation set of 20 sentences, the accuracy of our system achieve as high as 98.70% on conversion. The performance of our rule-based system shows that the rule-based sound patterns are effective on Korean grapheme-to-phoneme conversion.