Using machine learning techniques for grapheme to phoneme transcription

The renewed interest in grapheme to phoneme conversion (G2P), due to the need of developing multilingual speech synthesizers and recognizers, suggests new approaches more efficient than the traditional rule&exception ones. A number of studies have been performed to investigate the possible use of machine learning techniques to extract phonetic knowledge in a automatic way starting from a lexicon. In this paper, we present the results of our experiments in this research field. Starting from the state of art, our contribution is in the development of a language-independent learning scheme for G2P based on Classification and Regression Trees (CART). To validate our approach, we realized G2P converters for the following languages: British English, American English, French and Brazilian Portuguese.