Dictionary supported generation of English text from Pitman Shorthand scripted phonetic text

Abstract

The Pitman Shorthand Language (PSL) is a recording medium practised in all organizations, where English is the medium of transaction. It has the practical advantage of high speed of recording, more than 180 words per minute, because of which it is appreciably received. This recording medium continues to exist in spite of considerable developments in speech processing systems, which are not yet universally established. In order to exploit the vast transcribing potential of PSL a new area of research into automation of PSL processing is conceived. This paper describes the substitution of equivalent English words for the phonetic compositions of transcribed words, in the process of automatic generation of English text from a PSL document. Transcription is achieved by making use of two new types of dictionaries specifically developed and implemented for this purpose, one of them being a phonetic dictionary wherein the words are sequenced in phonetic order and the other being an extended conventional dictionary wherein the words are appended with additional details such as use domain, forms of verbs, etc. The proposed approach is tested with limited words in both dictionaries and is found to perform satisfactorily. However, the scope exists for addition of new words into these dictionaries.