An information theoretic approach to the automatic determination of phonemic baseforms

We present a method for predicting the phonemic baseform of a word given its spelling and a sample utterance. We have developed a procedure, based on information theoretic principles, for discovering a set of spelling-to-sound rules automatically. We have also constructed a simple phoneme recognizer. The spelling-to-sound rules predict the correct phoneme 93.7% of the time. When coupled with the phoneme recognizer, we are able to predict the correct phoneme 97.1% of the time.