The Development of a Comprehensive Spanish Dictionary for Phonetic and Lexical Tagging in Socio-phonetic Research (ESPADA)

Simon Gonzalez


Abstract
Pronunciation dictionaries are an important component in the process of speech forced alignment. The accuracy of these dictionaries has a strong effect on the aligned speech data since they help the mapping between orthographic transcriptions and acoustic signals. In this paper, I present the creation of a comprehensive pronunciation dictionary in Spanish (ESPADA) that can be used in most of the dialect variants of Spanish data. Current dictionaries focus on specific regional variants, but with the flexible nature of our tool, it can be readily applied to capture the most common phonetic differences across major dialectal variants. We propose improvements to current pronunciation dictionaries as well as mapping other relevant annotations such as morphological and lexical information. In terms of size, it is currently the most complete dictionary with more than 628,000 entries, representing words from 16 countries. All entries come with their corresponding pronunciations, morphological and lexical tagging, and other relevant information for phonetic analysis: stress patterns, phonotactics, IPA transcriptions, and more. This aims to equip socio-phonetic researchers with a complete open-source tool that enhances dialectal research within socio-phonetic frameworks in the Spanish language.
Anthology ID:
2022.law-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVI) within LREC2022
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Sameer Pradhan, Sandra Kuebler
Venue:
LAW
SIG:
SIGANN
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
8–14
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.law-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Simon Gonzalez. 2022. The Development of a Comprehensive Spanish Dictionary for Phonetic and Lexical Tagging in Socio-phonetic Research (ESPADA). In Proceedings of the 16th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVI) within LREC2022, pages 8–14, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
The Development of a Comprehensive Spanish Dictionary for Phonetic and Lexical Tagging in Socio-phonetic Research (ESPADA) (Gonzalez, LAW 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.law-1.2.pdf
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