Article published In:
Written Language & LiteracyVol. 19:2 (2016) ► pp.157–188
SHOTGUN: converting words into triplets
A hybrid approach to grapheme-phoneme conversion in Dutch
Software systems convert between graphemes and phonemes using lexicon-based, rule-based or data-driven techniques. SHOTGUN combines these techniques in a hybrid system which converts between graphemes and phonemes bi-directionally, adds linguistic and educational information about the relationships between graphemes and phonemes and provides estimates about the likelihood that the generated output is correct. We describe the components from which SHOTGUN is built and determine its accuracy by running tests on two data sources, the BasisSpellingBank and CELEX, comparing the results to Nunn’s (1998) rule-based conversion system. SHOTGUN converts phonemes to graphemes and vice versa with precision of 81% and 86% when tested on the BasisSpellingBank, and 80% and 81% when tested on CELEX. SHOTGUN proves to be a powerful new conversion tool.
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