Construction of letter to sound (LTS) conversion systems in Persian is a difficult task. Because of the omission of some vowels in Farsi orthography, these systems in general have low efficiencies. In this paper, the structure of a letter to sound system, having three-l More
Construction of letter to sound (LTS) conversion systems in Persian is a difficult task. Because of the omission of some vowels in Farsi orthography, these systems in general have low efficiencies. In this paper, the structure of a letter to sound system, having three-layer architecture, was presented. The first layer is rule-based, and the second layer consists of five multi layer perceptron (MLP) neural networks and a controller section for pronunciations determination. The third layer has a MLP network for detection of geminated letters by using results obtained from the previous steps. The proposed system is designed to produce rational pronunciations for every word, where the rational pronunciation means a phonetic transcription, which follows the correct Farsi syllabification structure and the obvious rules of phonetics. The authors have achieved 88% and 61% correct letters and words performance respectively, which is quite satisfactory for a Farsi language LTS system. The correct letter criterion is the percentage of letters for which the pronunciations have been determined correctly and the correct word criterion is the percentage of words for which the pronunciations of the constituting letters have been determined correctly.
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