Standardising Pronunciation for a Grapheme-to-Phoneme Converter for Faroese

Sandra Saxov Lamhauge, Iben Nyholm Debess, Carlos Daniel Hernández Mena, Annika Simonsen, Jon Gudnason

Keywords: Faroese, Pronunciation Dictionary, G2P, SAMPA

TL;DR: Presenting a set of Faroese pronunciation dictionaries, a Faroese SAMPA and G2P model

Abstract: Pronunciation dictionaries allow computational modelling of the pronunciation of words in a certain language and are widely used in speech technologies, especially in the fields of speech recognition and synthesis. On the other hand, a grapheme-to-phoneme tool is a generalization of a pronunciation dictionary that is not limited to a given and finite vocabulary. In this paper, we present a set of standardized phonological rules for the Faroese language; we introduce FARSAMPA, a machine-readable character set suitable for phonetic transcription of Faroese, and we present a set of grapheme-to-phoneme models for Faroese, which are publicly available and shared under a creative commons license. We present the G2P converter and evaluate the performance. The evaluation shows reliable results that demonstrate the quality of the data.

Student Paper: Yes, the first author is a student