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Corpus Phonemizers

This repository contains scripts for converting various corpora to a unified IPA format, with marked word and utterance boundaries, to prepare them for training and evaluating small transformer-based language models.

The main entry point is corpus_phonemizer.py (see below for usage). This repository also contains scripts used to prepare phonemized versions of specific corpora in /datasets, including:

  • CHILDES
  • BabyLM training data
  • BabyLM evaluation data (including BLiMP, BLiMP Supplement, GLUE, EWoK)
  • British National Corpus (BNC)

In some cases, analysis notebooks and scripts to train tokenizers are also included.

Installation

To run the scripts, first create a virtual environment for the project by running setup.sh.

./setup.sh
source setup.sh

Additional dependencies

The corpus_phonemizer.py with the phonemizer backend requires espeak-ng to be installed.

On mac, the backend requires PHONEMIZER_ESPEAK_LIBRARY to be set in the local environment. This will be read automatically from .env. You can add a line as follows to .env file and it will be applied automatically when you source setup.sh, e.g:

export PHONEMIZER_ESPEAK_LIBRARY=/opt/local/lib/libespeak-ng.dylib

The epitran backend with Mandarin requires CEDICT to be downloaded and placed in /data/cedict_ts.u8.

The epitran backend with English requires Flite to be installed. See instructions here.

Usage

The corpus_phonemizer.py script is the main entry point for converting corpora to a unified IPA format. It supports multiple backends, including epitran and phonemizer, each of which supports multiple languages. The help menu (-h) describes usage and the languages supported by each backend. The script reads lines from an input file (using -i) and saves space-separated IPA phonemes to an output file (using -o) or reads/writes to/from STDIN/STDOUT if files are not provided. Word boundaries are provided between words using -k using a WORD_BOUNDARY token.

For many languages, the underlying transcription tool does not output phoneme sets that match typical phoneme inventories for that language. As such, we have implemented "folding" dictionaries for many languages that attempt to map the output of a backend for a language to a standard phoneme inventory. See src/dicts.py for these dictionaries. This "folding" can be turned off using -u.

Example usage:

> python phonemize.py phonemizer en-gb -k
hello there!
h ə l əʊ WORD_BOUNDARY ð eə WORD_BOUNDARY