Philippa H. Louw

Phonetic analysis of Afrikaans, English, Xhosa and Zulu using South African speech databases

We present a corpus-based analysis of the Afrikaans, English, Xhosa and Zulu languages, comparing these in terms of phonetic content, diversity and mutual overlap. Our aim is to shed light on the fundamental phonetic interrelationships between these languages, with a view to furthering progress in multilingual automatic speech recognition in general, and in the South African region in particular.

A new definition of Xhosa grapheme-to-phoneme rules for automatic transcription

A new definition of grapheme-to-phoneme rules was developed for automatically transcribing Xhosa text. An existing rule set was expanded and refined for the purposes of enhancing its accuracy and computational implementation. The new algorithm was implemented in various transcription and labelling processes involved in developing telephone speech databases for the AST project and proved to be of practical importance for linguistic research, Text-to-Speech and Automatic Speech Recognition applications.