Notes on computational linguistics.pdf - UCLA Department of ...

Stabler - Lx 185/209 2003
(4) There are quite a few language resources available online. One of them is Roger Mitton’s (1992) phonetic
dictionary in the Oxford Text Archive. It has 70645 words of various kinds with phonetic transcriptions
of British English. The beginning of the listing looks like this:
’neath niT T-$ 1
’shun SVn W-$ 1
’twas tw0z Gf$ 1
’tween twin Pu$,T-$ 1
’tween-decks ’twin-deks Pu$ 2
’twere tw3R Gf$ 1
’twill twIl Gf$ 1
’twixt twIkst T-$ 1
’twould twUd Gf$ 1
’un @n Qx$ 1
A eI Ki$ 1
A’s eIz Kj$ 1
A-bombs ’eI-b0mz Kj$ 2
A-level ’eI-levl K6% 3
A-levels ’eI-levlz Kj% 3
AA ,eI’eI Y>% 2
ABC ,eI,bi’si Y>% 3
The second column is a phonetic transcription of the word spelled in the first column. (Columns 3 and
4 contain syntactic category, number of syllables.)
The phonetic transcription has notations for 43 sounds. My guesses on the translation:
Mitton IPA example Mitton IPA example
i i bead N sing
I Á bid T Ì thin
e bed D ð then
& æ bad S Ë shed
A a bard Z beige
0(zero) cod O cord
U Í good u u food
p p t t
k k b b
d d g g
V m m
n n f f
v v s s
z z 3 bird
r r l l
w w h h
j j @ about
eI eÁ day @U oÎ go
aI aÁ eye aU aÍ cow
oI oÁ boy I@ Á beer
e@ bare U@ Í tour
R far
The phonetic entries also mark primary stress with an apostrophe, and secondary stress with an comma.
Word boundaries in compound forms are indicated with a +, unless they are spelled with a hyphen or
space, in which case the phonetic entries do the same.
bookclub above board air-raid
a. Mitton’s dictionary is organized by spelling, rather than by phonetic transcription, but it would be
easy to reverse. Write a program that maps phonetic sequences like this
[ ′ D ′ , ′ @ ′ , k, ′ & ′ , t, ′ I ′ , z, ′ O ′ , n, ′ D ′ , ′ @ ′ , m, ′ & ′ , t]
to word sequences like this:
[the, cat, is, on, the, mat].
b. As in the previous problem (3), connect this translator to the recognizer, so that we can recognize
certain phonetic sequences as sentences.
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