2020/10/09 by Chu, Christopher, Fang, Scot, Knight, Kevin
#Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2010.04744
We demonstrate a program that learns to pronounce Chinese text in Mandarin, without a pronunciation dictionary. From non-parallel streams of Chinese characters and Chinese pinyin syllables, it establishes a many-to-many mapping between characters and pronunciations. Using unsupervised methods, the program effectively deciphers writing into speech. Its token-level character-to-syllable accuracy is 89%, which significantly exceeds the 22% accuracy of prior work.