Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion for Korean Point-of-Interest Data Using Prosodic Words

Point-of-Interest (POI) data are location enriched word data, which consist of personal names, place names including administrative districts, and names of business and recreational locations. They are essential to the development of applications such as Telematics, wireless location-based services (LBS), and tourism and other business applications. Being a major component of Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, a Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) conversion system maps the orthography to its corresponding sequence of phonemes. When POI data are converted into corresponding pronunciations, two characteristics of the data need to be considered. First, they are proper names, which are known to be closely related to irregular pronunciations in Korean. Second, most POI data are compound or complex words consisting of more than two words. A constituent of a POI word belongs to many other words. Therefore, it is a prerequisite to separate each word into its constituents in order to derive its pronunciation which includes irregular pronunciations. In this paper, we propose a G2P conversion system that detects irregular pronunciations for Korean POI data, by adopting the notion of prosodic word based on Prosodic Phonology (Selkirk 1984). The performance of the proposed system depends on the effective detection of irregular pronunciation words. According to our proposed system, all the words in the POI data were broken down into prosodi