Thu-2-3-4 Malayalam - English code-switched: Grapheme to Phoneme System

Abstract: Grapheme to phoneme conversion is an integral aspect of speech processing. Conversational speech in Malayalam – a low resource Indic language has inter-sentential, intra-sentential code-switching as well as frequent intra-word code-switching with English. Monolingual G2P systems cannot process such special intra-word code-switching scenarios. A G2P system which can handle code-switching developed based on Malayalam-English code-switch speech and text corpora is presented. Since neither Malayalam nor English are phonetic subset of each other, the overlapping phonemes for English – Malayalam are identified and analysed. Additional rules used to handle special cases of Malayalam phonemes and intra-word code-switching in the G2P system is also presented specifically.