LEXiTRON-Pro Editor: An integrated tool for developing Thai pronunciation dictionary

摘要

Pronunciation dictionary is a crucial part for both Text-To-Speech and Automatic Speech Recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a tool to easily create and edit Thai pronunciation dictionary, called LEXiTRON-Pro Editor. This tool integrates Thai word segmentation, Thai Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) conversion, and database system with statistics. It automatically proposes a word's pronunciation to users by 1 of the 3 options in the successive order: the pronunciation from LEXiTRON-Pro database, the pronunciation combined from syllables with highest probability, and the pronunciation from Thai G2P. However, users can switch to another option or even directly input their own pronunciation with an easy interface editor. Our LEXiTRON-Pro database contains initially 105,129 unique words and 24,736 unique syllables with pronunciations. Compared to the previous version, our new program can reduce the process of dictionary development from 5 to only 1 step and the number of tools used by linguists from 3 to only 1. Moreover, our experiment shows that the time consumption and the number of ungenerable words are significantly reduced while the pronunciation accuracy is considerably improved.