Automatic Phonetic Transcription by Phonological Derivation

Abstract. Automatic phonetic transcription tools usually perform pho-netic transcriptions directly from orthographic representations. Although these approaches often achieve good results, theoretical studies suggest that including morphophonological knowledge allows those systems to improve their performance. Following this idea, we developed a tool which first obtains an underlying representation of each word, using small lexica and dedicated lemmatizers. For each representation, a phonologi-cal derivation generates the phonetic transcription by applying linguisti-cally motivated rules. Since most of these rules are added as optional pa-rameters, the system permits to generate dialect-specific transcriptions. This system is not only a grapheme-to-phone tool, but it also obtains phonological representations and evaluates several linguistic processes occurring during the derivation. Preliminary experiments emulating a phonological system of Galician (using as input words spelled in Euro-pean Portuguese) show that the underlying representation of most words can be obtained using small lexica and also that the derivation produces high-quality phonetic transcriptions