Effort and accuracy during language resource generation: A pronunciation prediction case study

Abstract

When developing a language resource, there is generally a trade-off between the amount of effort invested in the resource creation process and the quality of the resulting resource. We argue that, in the developing world with its many resource-scarce languages, a ‘usable’ resource in multiple languages may be more valuable than a highly accurate resource for one language only. From this perspective we investigate the resource validation process — determining whether a resource is sufficiently accurate -- using the creation of a pronunciation dictionary as case study. We show that the amount of effort required to validate a 20,000-word pronunciation dictionary can be reduced substantially by employing appropriate computational tools, when compared to both a fully manual validation process and a competing automatic process.