Automatic Generation of Compound Word Lexicon for Hindi Speech Synthesis

This paper addresses the problem of Hindi compound word splitting and its relevance to developing a good quality phonetizer for Hindi Speech Synthesis. The constituents of a Hindi compound word are not separated by space or hyphen. Hence, most of the existing compound splitting algorithms can not be applied to Hindi. We propose a new technique for automatic extraction of compound words from Hindi corpus. Preliminary tests conducted on the algorithm have shown a split rate of 92 to 96% of the input compound words. Of these splits, around 83 to 87% are correct splits. A few modifications have been suggested, which will improve the accuracy of the splits. Finally, we observe an improvement of 1.6% in Hindi Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) conversion as a result of using a phonetized compound word lexicon, created by the above technique.