phonecodes 1.2.0

Tools for loading dictionaries with various phonecodes (IPA, Callhome, X-SAMPA, ARPABET, DISC=CELEX, Buckeye), for converting among those phonecodes, and for searching those dictionaries for word sequences matching a target.

phonecodes

This library provides tools for converting between the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and other phonetic alphabets used to transcribe speech, including Callhome, X-SAMPA, ARPABET, DISC/CELEX, Buckeye Corpus Phonetic Alphabet, and TIMIT. Additionally, tools for searching mappings between phonetic symbols and reading/writing pronounciation lexicon files in several standard formats are also provided.

These functionalities are useful for processing data for automatic speech recognition, text to speech, and linguistic analyses of speech.

Setup and Installation

Install the library by running pip install phonecodes with python 3.10 or greater. It probably works with earlier versions of python, but this was not tested.

Developers may refer to the CONTRIBUTIONS.md for information on the development environment for testing, linting and contributing to the code.

Basic Usage

Converting between Phonetic Alphabets

If you want to convert to or from IPA to some other phonetic code, use phonecodes.phonecodes as follows:

>>> from phonecodes import phonecodes
>>> print(phonecodes.CODES) # available phonetic alphabets
{'arpabet', 'buckeye', 'ipa', 'timit', 'callhome', 'xsampa', 'disc'}
>>> phonecodes.convert("DH IH S IH Z AH0 T EH1 S T", "arpabet", "ipa", "eng") # convert from IPA to ARPABET with language explicitly specified
'ð ɪ s ɪ z ə t ˈɛ s t'
>>> phonecodes.convert("ð ɪ s ɪ z ə t ˈɛ s t", "ipa", "arpabet") # convert from IPA to ARPABET with optional language left out
'DH IH S IH Z AH0 T EH1 S T'
>>> phonecodes.ipa2arpabet("ð ɪ s ɪ z ə t ˈɛ s t", "eng") # equivalent to previous with explicit language
'DH IH S IH Z AH0 T EH1 S T'
>>> phonecodes.ipa2arpabet("ð ɪ s ɪ z ə t ˈɛ s t") # equivalent to previous with optional language left out
'DH IH S IH Z AH0 T EH1 S T'
>>> phonecodes.convert("DH IH S IH Z AH0 T EH1 S T", "arpabet", "ipa") # convert from ARPABET to IPA, optional language left out
'ð ɪ s ɪ z ə t ˈɛ s t'
>>> phonecodes.arpabet2ipa("DH IH S IH Z AH0 T EH1 S T", "eng") # equivalent to previous with optional language explicit
'ð ɪ s ɪ z ə t ˈɛ s t'

For 'arpabet', 'buckeye', 'timit' and 'xsampa', specifying a language is optional and ignored by the code, since X-SAMPA is language agnostic and ARAPABET, Buckeye, and TIMIT were designed to work only for English.

For 'callhome' and 'disc' you should also specify a language code from the following lists:

• DISC/CELEX: Dutch 'nld', English 'eng', German 'deu'. Uses German if unspecified.
• Callhome: Spanish 'spa', Egyptian Arabic 'arz', Mandarin Chinese 'cmn'. You MUST specify an appropriate language code or you'll get a KeyError.

Reading Corpus Files

If you are working with specific corpora, you can also convert between certain corpus formats as follows:

>>> from phonecodes import pronlex
>>> my_lex = pronlex.read("test/fixtures/isle_eng_sample.txt", "isle", "eng") # Read in an English ISLE corpus file
>>> my_lex.w2p # see orthographic to phonetic word mapping
{'a': ['#', 'ə', '#'], 'is': ['#', 'ɪ', 'z', '#'], 'test': ['#', 't', 'ˈɛ', 's', 't', '#'], 'this': ['#', 'ð', 'ɪ', 's', '#']}
new_lex = my_lex.recode('arpabet') # Convert mapping to ARPABET
>>> new_lex.w2p
{'a': ['#', 'AH0', '#'], 'is': ['#', 'IH', 'Z', '#'], 'test': ['#', 'T', 'EH1', 'S', 'T', '#'], 'this': ['#', 'DH', 'IH', 'S', '#']}

The supported corpus formats and their corresponding phonetic alphabets are as follows:

Corpus Format	Phonetic Alphabet	Language Options
'babel'	'xsampa'	'amh', 'asm', 'ben', 'yue', 'ceb', 'luo', 'kat', 'gug', 'hat', 'ibo', 'jav', 'kur', 'lao', 'lit', 'mon', 'pus', 'swa', 'tgl', 'tam', 'tpi', 'tur', 'vie', 'zul'
'callhome'	'callhome'	'arz', 'cmn', 'spa'
'celex'	'disc'	'eng', 'ndl', 'deu'
'isle'	'ipa'	Not required

Known Limitations

• You cannot convert to TIMIT format from IPA or any other phonecode, because TIMIT marks closures of stops with separate symbols. There are no symbols corresponding to these closures in other phonecodes and the closure is not predictable from the transcription alone.