A learning method for Thai phonetization of English words

This article tackles the problem of transcribing English words using Thai phonological system. The problem exists in Thai, where modern writing often composes of English orthography, and transcribing using English phonology results unnatural. The proposed model is totally data-driven, starting by automatic grapheme-phoneme alignment, modeling transduction rules and predicting Thai syllabictones using learning machines. Three specific issues are addresses. The first one is involving English transcription information in transduction once the input English word appears in an English pronunciation dictionary. Second, more precise transduction rules can be obtained by a constraint of Thai syllable-structure. Lastly, the ambiguity in assigning tones to Thai pronunciations of English words is alleviated by introducing a learning machine. The proposed model achieves acceptable results in both objective and text-tospeech synthesis subjective tests.