Irregular Pronunciation Detection for Korean Point-of-Interest Data Using Prosodic Word

This paper aims to propose a method of detecting irregular pronunciations for Korean POI data adopting the notion of the Prosodic Word based on the Prosodic Phonology (Selkirk 1984, Nespor and Vogel 1986) and Intonational Phonology (Jun 1996). In order to show the performance of the proposed method, the detection experiment was conducted on the 250,000 POI data. When all the data were trained, 99.99% of the exceptional prosodic words were detected, which shows the stability of the system. The results show that similar ratio of exceptional prosodic words (22.4% on average) were detected on each stage where a certain amount of the training data were added. Being intended to be an example of an interdisciplinary study of linguistics and computer science, this study will, on the one hand, provide an understanding of Korean language from the phonological point of view, and, on the other hand, enable a systematic development of a multiple pronunciation lexicon for Korean TTS or ASR systems of high performance.