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    <abstract>High-quality International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions are a foundational resource for speech and language technologies, yet existing tools for many low-resource languages remain limited in accuracy and scope. In this work, we present MekongPhon, a large-scale, high-quality parallel IPA corpus for Lao and Khmer. The corpus contains 1.3 million Khmer and 367 thousand Lao orthographic–IPA pairs, meticulously aligned and verified. When used to train Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence models, MekongPhon enables exceptionally accurate IPA generation, achieving under 2% Character Error Rate (CER) on held-out test sets. We further introduce linguistically informed Lao and Khmer transliteration tools that offer high-speed IPA conversion, outperforming Epitran by 6-71 CER points despite trading some accuracy for efficiency. All data, code, and pretrained models are publicly released to support future research and development in low-resource language technologies.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T MekongPhon: A Large-Scale Parallel IPA Corpus for Lao and Khmer
%A Shurtz, Ammon
%A Richardson, Christian
%A Richardson, Stephen D.
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F shurtz-etal-2026-mekongphon
%X High-quality International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions are a foundational resource for speech and language technologies, yet existing tools for many low-resource languages remain limited in accuracy and scope. In this work, we present MekongPhon, a large-scale, high-quality parallel IPA corpus for Lao and Khmer. The corpus contains 1.3 million Khmer and 367 thousand Lao orthographic–IPA pairs, meticulously aligned and verified. When used to train Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence models, MekongPhon enables exceptionally accurate IPA generation, achieving under 2% Character Error Rate (CER) on held-out test sets. We further introduce linguistically informed Lao and Khmer transliteration tools that offer high-speed IPA conversion, outperforming Epitran by 6-71 CER points despite trading some accuracy for efficiency. All data, code, and pretrained models are publicly released to support future research and development in low-resource language technologies.
%R 10.63317/4bb9rvdshu4z
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.129/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/4bb9rvdshu4z
%P 1650-1658

Markdown (Informal)

[MekongPhon: A Large-Scale Parallel IPA Corpus for Lao and Khmer](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.129/) (Shurtz et al., LREC 2026)

• MekongPhon: A Large-Scale Parallel IPA Corpus for Lao and Khmer (Shurtz et al., LREC 2026)

ACL

• Ammon Shurtz, Christian Richardson, and Stephen D. Richardson. 2026. MekongPhon: A Large-Scale Parallel IPA Corpus for Lao and Khmer. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1650–1658, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.