The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (also known as CMUdict) is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

pronouncing

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...

originally created by the Speech Group at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

(CMU) for use in

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

research. CMUdict provides a mapping orthographic/phonetic for English words in their North American pronunciations. It is commonly used to generate representations for

(ASR), e.g. the

CMU Sphinx CMU Sphinx, also called Sphinx for short, is the general term to describe a group of speech recognition systems developed at Carnegie Mellon University. These include a series of speech recognizers (Sphinx 2 - 4) and an acoustic model traine ...

system, and

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

(TTS), e.g. the

Festival A festival is an event ordinarily celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, mela, or eid. A festival c ...

system. CMUdict can be used as a training corpus for building statistical grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) models that will generate pronunciations for words not yet included in the dictionary. The most recent release is 0.7b; it contains over 134,000 entries. An interactive lookup version is available.

Database format

The database is distributed as a plain text file with one entry to a line in the format "WORD " with a two-space separator between the parts. If multiple pronunciations are available for a word, variants are identified using numbered versions (e.g. WORD(1)). The pronunciation is encoded using a modified form of the

ARPABET ARPABET (also spelled ARPAbet) is a set of phonetic transcription codes developed by Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a part of their Speech Understanding Research project in the 1970s. It represents phonemes and allophones of General ...

system, with the addition of stress marks on vowels of levels 0, 1, and 2. A line-initial ;;; token indicates a comment. A derived format, directly suitable for speech recognition engines is also available as part of the distribution; this format collapses stress distinctions (typically not used in ASR). The following is a table of phonemes used by CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.

History

Applications

* The

Unifon Unifon is a Latin script, Latin-based phonemic orthography for American English designed in the mid-1950s by Dr. John R. Malone, a Chicago economist and newspaper equipment consultant. It was developed into a teaching aid to help children acqui ...

converter is based on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. * The

Natural Language Toolkit The Natural Language Toolkit, or more commonly NLTK, is a suite of libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing (NLP) for English written in the Python programming language. It was developed by Steven Bird and E ...

contains an interface to the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. * The Carnegie Mellon Logios{{Cite web , url=https://cmusphinx.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cmusphinx/trunk/logios/ , title=Cmusphinx - Revision 10973: /Trunk/Logios , access-date=2009-12-19 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110520085139/https://cmusphinx.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cmusphinx/trunk/logios/ , archive-date=2011-05-20 , url-status=dead tool incorporates the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
PronunDict
a pronunciation dictionary of American English, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary as its data source. Pronunciation is transcribed in

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...

symbols. This dictionary also supports searching by pronunciation. * Some singing voice synthesizer software like CeVIO Creative Studio and

Synthesizer V A synthesizer (also spelled synthesiser) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and f ...

uses modified version of CMU Pronouncing Dictionary for synthesizing English singing voices.
Transcriber
a tool for the full text phonetic transcription, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary * 15.ai, a real-time text-to-speech tool using artificial intelligence, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary

References

External links

* The current version of the dictionary is a
SourceForge
although there is also a version maintained o
GitHub

Homepage
– includes database search
RDF
converted to

Resource Description Framework The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of ...

by the open source Texai project. English pronouncing dictionaries Natural language processing Public domain databases Carnegie Mellon University Software using the BSD license

Database format

History

Applications

See also

References

External links