One Model to Pronounce Them All: Multilingual Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion With a Transformer Ensemble

Kaili Vesik, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Miikka Silfverberg


Abstract
The task of grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion is important for both speech recognition and synthesis. Similar to other speech and language processing tasks, in a scenario where only small-sized training data are available, learning G2P models is challenging. We describe a simple approach of exploiting model ensembles, based on multilingual Transformers and self-training, to develop a highly effective G2P solution for 15 languages. Our models are developed as part of our participation in the SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task 1 focused at G2P. Our best models achieve 14.99 word error rate (WER) and 3.30 phoneme error rate (PER), a sizeable improvement over the shared task competitive baselines.
Anthology ID:
2020.sigmorphon-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Garrett Nicolai, Kyle Gorman, Ryan Cotterell
Venue:
SIGMORPHON
SIG:
SIGMORPHON
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
146–152
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigmorphon-1.16
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sigmorphon-1.16
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kaili Vesik, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, and Miikka Silfverberg. 2020. One Model to Pronounce Them All: Multilingual Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion With a Transformer Ensemble. In Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 146–152, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
One Model to Pronounce Them All: Multilingual Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion With a Transformer Ensemble (Vesik et al., SIGMORPHON 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigmorphon-1.16.pdf