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Compact text-to-phone pronunciation dictionary

  • US 7,080,005 B1
  • Filed: 06/08/2000
  • Issued: 07/18/2006
  • Est. Priority Date: 07/19/1999
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. A processor for creating a reduced size encoded pronunciation dictionary from an input pronunciation dictionary such that the encoded pronunciation dictionary does not need to be expanded to a larger size in order to be utilized, comprising:

  • a reading and sorting processor to read an input pronunciation dictionary and sort the words of the dictionary in alphabetical order;

    a word encoder that encodes each word of the pronunciation dictionary by comparing the word with the prior word encoded and either outputs the number of prefix characters that match both the word and the prior word beginning characters if the number of matching characters is greater than or equal to N followed by the suffix characters of the word after character N, or outputs all characters of the word if the number of prefix characters that match the word and prior encoded word is less than N;

    a text-to-pronunciation processor that operates on the word to be encoded to generate a pronunciation hypothesis;

    a pronunciation comparer that compares the pronunciation of each word by comparing the pronunciation of the word from the input pronunciation dictionary and the pronunciation hypothesis from the text-to-pronunciation processor and determines the minimum number of pronunciation differences consisting of substitutions, deletions and insertions that need to be corrected in the pronunciation hypothesis to convert it to match the pronunciation of the input pronunciation dictionary; and

    a pronunciation encoder that compares the pronunciation differences of the word to the pronunciation differences of the prior encoded word and either outputs the number of prefix differences that match the beginning of both the word differences and the prior word differences followed by the suffix differences of the word if the number of prefix matching differences is greater than or equal to M, or outputs all differences to the word if the number of prefix differences that match the word and prior encoded word is less than N.

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