Linguistic Knowledge in Multilingual Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion

Abstract

This paper documents the UBC Linguistics team’s approach to the SIGMORPHON 2021 Grapheme-to-Phoneme Shared Task, concentrating on the low-resource setting. Our systems expand the baseline model with simple modifications informed by syllable structure and error analysis. In-depth investigation of test-set predictions shows that our best model rectifies a significant number of mistakes compared to the baseline prediction, besting all other submissions. Our results validate the view that careful error analysis in conjunction with linguistic knowledge can lead to more effective computational modeling.