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I'm writing an Elman Simple Recurrent Network. I want to give it sequences of words, where each word is a sequence of phonemes, and I want a lot of training and test data.

So, what I need is a corpus of English words, together with the phonemes they're made up of, written as something like ARPAbet or SAMPA. British English would be nice but is not essential so long as I know what I'm dealing with. Any suggestions?

I do not currently have the time or the inclination to code something that derives the phonemes a word is comprised of from spoken or written data so please don't propose that.

Note: I'm aware of the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, but it claims it's only based on the ARPABet symbol set - anyone know if there are actually any differences and if so what they are? (If there aren't any then I could just use that...)

EDIT: CMUPD 0.7a Symbol list - vowels may have lexical stress, and there are variants (of ARPABET standard symbols) indicating this.

tshepang
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Iskar Jarak
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1 Answers1

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CMUdict should be fine. "Arpabet symbol set" just means Arpabet. If there are any minor differences, they should be explained in the CMUdict documentation.

If you need data that's closer to real life than stringing together dictionary pronunciations of individual words, look for phonetically transcribed corpora, e.g., TIMIT.

aab
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  • My main issue is not the "symbol set" part of that phrase, but the "based on" part. Looking at their [symbol list](https://cmusphinx.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cmusphinx/trunk/cmudict/cmudict.0.7a.symbols), combined with the description on the page I linked to in my question, the only difference appears to be that they have added variants indicating lexical stress. Also, thanks for mentioning phonetically transcribed corpora - that's a good direction for me to look in once I've got the basics on individual words working nicely. – Iskar Jarak Sep 09 '11 at 23:26