A new definition of Xhosa grapheme-to-phoneme rules for automatic transcription

Abstract

A new definition of grapheme-to-phoneme rules was developed for automatically transcribing Xhosa text. An existing rule set was expanded and refined for the purposes of enhancing its accuracy and computational implementation. The new algorithm was implemented in various transcription and labelling processes involved in developing telephone speech databases for the AST project and proved to be of practical importance for linguistic research, Text-to-Speech and Automatic Speech Recognition applications.