frhyme 0.1

Guess the last phonemes of a French word

frhyme -- a toolkit to guess the last phonemes of a French word Copyright (C) 2011-2019 by Antoine Amarilli Repository URL: https://gitlab.com/a3nm/frhyme

== 0. Licence ==

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

== 1. Features ==

frhyme is a tool to guess what the last phonemes of a French word are. It is trained on a list of words with associated pronunciation, and will infer a few likely possibilities for unseen words using known words with the longest common prefix, using a trie for internal representation.

== 2. Usage ==

To avoid licensing headaches, and because the data file is quite big, no pronunciation data is included, you have to generate it yourself. See section 3.

Once you have pronunciation data ready in frhyme.json, you can either run frhyme.py [NBEST], giving one word per line in stdin and getting the NBEST top pronunciations on stdout (default is 5), or you can import it in a Python file and call frhyme.lookup(word, NBEST) which returns the NBEST top pronunciations (default is 5).

The pronunciations returned are annotated with a confidence score (the number of occurrences in the training data). They should be sensible up to the longest prefix occurring in the training data, but may be prefixed by garbage.

== 3. Training ==

First, make sure that you have a working python3 installation and that you have unzip (Debian packages: python3, unzip).

The data used by frhyme.py is loaded at runtime from the fryme.json file which should be trained from a pronunciation database. The recommended way to do so is to use a tweaked Lexique http://lexique.org along with a provided bugfix file, as follows:

lexique/lexique_retrieve.sh > lexique.txt ./make.sh NPHON lexique.txt additions > frhyme.json

where NPHON is the number of trailing phonemes to keep (suggested value: 4). Beware, this may take up several hundred megabytes of RAM. The resulting file should be accurate on the French words of Lexique, and will return pronunciations in a variant of X-SAMPA which ensures that each phoneme is mapped to exactly one ASCII character: the substitutions are "A~" => "#", "O~" => "$", "E~" => ")", "9~" => "(".