Hoyeon Lee

Author directory

2026

Text-to-speech systems increasingly process user-generated text (UGT) such as ppl and imo, whose pronunciation must be inferred from the canonical rather than surface form. We introduce UGTPHON, the first grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) benchmark for UGT in English, Vietnamese, and Korean, with an inference-grounded taxonomy. Existing G2P models and frontier LLMs share a systematic failure pattern, with the canonical-to-non-canonical gap reaching up to 66.8 PER points. We propose a retrieval-augmented G2P approach that explicitly models canonical-form inference through retrieval and staged decoding. Under 0.5B parameters, our approach shrinks this gap by up to 83% while outperforming most frontier LLMs that are orders of magnitude larger, demonstrating that explicit compositional structure can substitute for scale.

2024

Recent studies have addressed intricate phonological phenomena in French, relying on either extensive linguistic knowledge or a significant amount of sentence-level pronunciation data. However, creating such resources is expensive and non-trivial. To this end, we propose a novel two-step approach that encompasses two pronunciation tasks: grapheme-to-phoneme and post-lexical processing. We then investigate the efficacy of the proposed approach with a notably limited amount of sentence-level pronunciation data. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed two-step approach effectively mitigates the lack of extensive labeled data, and serves as a feasible solution for addressing French phonological phenomena even under resource-constrained environments.