A finite state network for phonetic text processing

Abstract

In the past, phonetic transcriptions were made using a wide variety of fonts and formats, which hampered the development of phonetic text processing tools. Today, however, the increasing number of language documentation projects making their data freely available over the Web, combined with the adoption of the Unicode Standard by linguists as "best practice" character encoding, present linguistic software developers with an unprecedented opportunity to develop powerful tools for the analysis of phonetic text. This paper describes the generation of a finite state transducer that converts text represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet into phonetic feature sets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.