The metaphone list appears to be dead, so I'm posting here... Has anyone looked at using the phonetic dictionaries used by speech synthesis projects such as festival to enhance the metaphone algorithm in aspell?
Speech synthesis systems typically use both a pronunciation dictionary and a rule based system to determine the pronunciation of words. The rule based system alone produces horrific mispronunciation with an unacceptable regularity. I presume that the rule based systems have similar characteristics to the rules used in metaphone. It occurred to me that it might be useful to refactor the metaphone algorithm to work with phenoms directly, breaking the operation up into a phenomic conversion step and then a compression step. Then the lookup dictionary is converted to it's metaphone representation using provided pronunciations for the words, while misspelled words are looked up using a rule based system. In my experience my mi spellings tend look more like the correct phonetic representation, so the rule based transformation should be reasonably likely to get it right. _______________________________________________ Aspell-devel mailing list Aspell-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/aspell-devel
