Alan Wong


2020

pdf bib
Massively Multilingual Pronunciation Modeling with WikiPron
Jackson L. Lee | Lucas F.E. Ashby | M. Elizabeth Garza | Yeonju Lee-Sikka | Sean Miller | Alan Wong | Arya D. McCarthy | Kyle Gorman
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We introduce WikiPron, an open-source command-line tool for extracting pronunciation data from Wiktionary, a collaborative multilingual online dictionary. We first describe the design and use of WikiPron. We then discuss the challenges faced scaling this tool to create an automatically-generated database of 1.7 million pronunciations from 165 languages. Finally, we validate the pronunciation database by using it to train and evaluating a collection of generic grapheme-to-phoneme models. The software, pronunciation data, and models are all made available under permissive open-source licenses.