Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of bilingual text-to-phoneme (TTP) mapping in which the phonetic transcription of isolated written words must be found. In general, in the bilingual/multilingual TTP mapping for isolated words, two processing steps are applied to each input word. The language of each word is first identified and then the letters of the word are translated into their phonetic transcriptions according to the recognized language. We use the multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network for the letter to phoneme conversion task and a hybrid approach composed of a MLP and a decision rule system for the language recognition task. We introduce a new bilingual TTP mapping system and we provide an analysis of the influence of several different factors on its phoneme accuracy.
Keywords: Neural network, multilayer perceptron, error back-propagation with momentum, text-to-phoneme mapping, phoneme accuracy.