CMU Pronunciation Dictionary Tools

Usage
VIM Syntax File
CMU Pronunciation Dictionary File Format
- Metadata
File-Based Metadata
Phone Table File Format
Metadata Description File Format
- CSV Metadata
- RDF Metadata
Configuration Options
- ACCENT
- FORMAT
- METADATA
- PHONESET
- SORT
- WARNING
License

This is a collection of tools for working with the CMU Pronunciation Dictionary.

Usage

The cmudict-tools program has the following command-line structure:

cmudict-tools [OPTIONS] COMMAND DICTIONARY

The supported OPTIONS are:

`OPTION`	Description
`-h`, `--help`	Show a help message and exit.
`-W` WARNING	Enable or disable the specified validation warnings.
`--source-accent` ACCENT	Use `ACCENT` to source the dictionary phonesets.
`--source-phoneset` PHONESET	Use `PHONESET` to validate the phones in the dictionary.
`--accent` ACCENT	Use `ACCENT` to source the output phonesets.
`--phoneset` PHONESET	Use `PHONESET` to validate the phones in the output.
`--format` FORMAT	Output the dictionary entries in `FORMAT`.
`--sort` SORT	Sort the entries using `SORT` ordering.
`--order-from ORDER_FROM`	Start variants at `ORDER_FROM`, including the initial entry.
`--help-warnings`	List the available validation warnings.
`--input-encoding ENCODING`	Use `ENCODING` to read the dictionary file in (e.g. `latin1`).
`--output-encoding ENCODING`	Use `ENCODING` to print the entries in (e.g. `latin1`).
`--remove-context-entries`	Ignore entries with a context specified.
`--remove-syllable-breaks`	Remove syllable break markers from pronunciations.
`--remove-stress`	Remove stress markers from pronunciations.

NOTE: The --remove-stress option will remove any duplicate entries that result from removing the stress markers.

COMMAND can be one of:

`COMMAND`	Description
`print`	Format and optionally sort the dictionary.
`validate`	Only perform validation checks.
`select=SELECTOR`	Select the item corresponding to `SELECTOR` (see below).

The DICTIONARY file is auto-detected according to one of the supported input FORMAT values.

The SELECTOR value can be:

`SELECTOR`	Description
`word`	Select the word field of the dictionary.
`@KEY`	Select `KEY` from the metadata section of the dictionary.
`A	B`

Example: Porter Stemmer

The select command can be used to extract the data used to test a Porter stemmer algorithm:

./cmudict-tools select=word cmudict > in.txt
./cmudict-tools select="@stem|word" cmudict > out.txt

This examples entries to have metadata like:

BURN  B ER1 N
BURNING  B ER1 N IH0 NG #@@ stem=BURN @@

Example: Phonetisaurus

The dictionary can be converted to a form that is usable with phonetisaurus-align by running:

./cmudict-tools --format=sphinx --remove-context-entries \
	print cmudict > cmudict.lex

Or, if you don't want stresses on vowels:

./cmudict-tools --format=sphinx --remove-context-entries --remove-stress \
	print cmudict > cmudict.lex

This can then be passed to phonetisaurus-align using:

phonetisaurus-align --input=cmudict.lex --ofile=cmudict.corpus --seq1_del=false

Example: Sphinx Dictionary

To generate a sphinx4 dictionary you can run:

./cmudict-tools --format=sphinx --remove-stress \
	print cmudict > cmudict_SPHINX_40

VIM Syntax File

The cmudict-tools project provides a syntax highlighting file for cmudict-style dictionaries.

You can install the files to a VIM install by running:

make VIMDIR=<path-to-vim> vim

Alternatively, if your system supports VIM addons (e.g. Debian Linux), you can install the files by running:

make vim_plugin

which installs the files to /usr/share/vim. If the addon files are not in this location, you need to point VIMDIR to the addons directory and VIMPLUGINDIR to the registry directory.

Once installed, it will automatically highlight files named cmudict. You can explicitly enable highlighting by using the VIM command:

set ft=cmudict

The following variables and file-based metadata are supported:

Variable	Metadata	Default	Description
`b:cmudict_accent`=ACCENT	`accent`=ACCENT	`en-US`	The accent the dictionary is specified in.
`b:cmudict_phoneset`=PHONESET	`phoneset`=PHONESET	`cmu`	The phoneset used to transcribe the phones in.
`b:cmudict_format`=FORMAT	`format`=FORMAT	auto	The specific format of the dictionary.

NOTE: The file-based metadata must occur within the first 5 lines of the file to be supported by the VIM syntax file.

If no FORMAT is specified, its value is determined based on the content. This logic has rules for the old Weide format as well as the new formats (both the currently maintained dictionary and cmudict-new formats). Additionally, it detects files containing Pronunciation Dictionary within a ;;; comment as cmudict documents.

NOTE: You need to set the variables before setting the filetype. For example:

let b:cmudict_phoneset="arpabet"
set ft=cmudict

Alternatively, you can set this information as file-based metadata. For example:

;;;@@ phoneset=arpabet @@

CMU Pronunciation Dictionary File Format

A line comment starts with ;;; and spans until the end of the current line. In the cmudict-weide format, a line comment starts with ##.

An entry has the form ENTRY PRONUNCIATION, where ENTRY consists of WORD for the primary entry for the word, or WORD(VARIANT) for an alternate entry. The ENTRY and PRONUNCIATION are separated by two space ( ) characters and ENTRY is in upper case. In the cmudict-new format, ENTRY and PRONUNCIATION are separated by a single space ( ) character and ENTRY is in lower case.

The VARIANT consists of a number from 1 to 9 that denotes an alternate entry. These are numbered consecutively from 1 in the current cmudict format and from 2 in the cmudict-weide and cmudict-new formats.

The PRONUNCIATION section consists of Arpabet-based phones separated by a single space ( ). The casing of the phones depends on the phoneset being used. The vowels have an additional stress marker, which can be:

0 for an unstressed vowel;
1 for a primary stressed vowel;
2 for a secondary stressed vowel.

An entry may have a comment. These comments start with # and span to the end of the line.

NOTE: The various releases of the cmudict contain various formatting errors in several entries, where those entries deviate from the format described here. These will show up as validation warnings when those dictionary versions are run through cmudict-tools with the appropriate validation warnings enabled.

Metadata

Metadata is not supported in the official CMU dictionary format. However, the cmudict-tools project interprets specifically formatted comments as metadata. This allows additional information to be provided in a way that is compatible with existing cmudict tools.

Metadata occurs in line comments for file-based metadata, or entry comments for entry-based metadata. The metadata section of the comment starts and ends with @@. The @@ must be at the start of the comment (i.e. no spaces or other characters) for it to be recognised as metadata. Any text after the metadata is treated as a regular comment.

The content within the metadata block may be in one of the following formats:

key-value

The content within the metadata block is a sequence of space-separated key=value pairs. A key can occur multiple times, in which case the key will have both values.
json

The metadata is a JSON string.

File-Based Metadata

This is metadata on line comments in the given dictionary format. This must be in the key-value format.

The file-based metadata that cmudict-tools understands is:

Metadata	Default	Description
`accent`=ACCENT	`en-US`	The accent the dictionary is specified in.
`encoding`=`ENCODING`	`windows-1252`	The character encoding the dictionary entries are encoded in.
`format`=FORMAT	auto	The specific format of the dictionary.
`metadata-format`=`FORMAT`	`key-value`	The format type of entry-based metadata.
`metadata`=METADATA		The specification for entry-based metadata.
`order-from`=`ORDER_FROM`	0	Start variants at `ORDER_FROM`, including the initial entry.
`phoneset`=PHONESET	`cmu`	The phoneset used to transcribe the phones in.
`sorting`=SORT	`none`	Sort the entries using `SORT` ordering.

Phone Table File Format

This is a CSV document with the first line containing the titles of each field. At a minimum, it needs to support the following fields:

Arpabet is the phone using an upper-case Arpabet transcription, excluding the stress marker;
Normalized is the optional canonical form for phonesets that use a different transcription for a given phone;
IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription for the phone excluding stress markers;
Type is the phone type (see below) of the given phone;
Phone Sets is a semi-colon (;) separated list of phonesets that support this phone.

The Type field supports any values that can be separated using a ;. The following values are given special meanings:

schwa -- A weak vowel that can have an optional unstressed (0) stress marker in pronunciations.
vowel -- A vowel that must have a stress marker in pronunciations.

For example:

Arpabet,Normalized,IPA,Type,Phone Sets
AA,,ɑ,vowel,arpabet;ipa;cmu;festvox;cepstral;timit
AE,,æ,vowel,arpabet;ipa;cmu;festvox;cepstral;timit

Metadata Description File Format

File Type	Metadata Format
CSV	CSV Metadata
Turtle	RDF Metadata
RDF/XML	RDF Metadata
N-Triples	RDF Metadata

NOTE: The Turtle and RDF/XML formats require the rapper command-line application. This is so those formats can be converted to the N-Triple format.

CSV Metadata

This is a CSV document with the first line containing the titles of each field. At a minimum, it needs to support the following fields:

Key is the metadata key;
Value is an allowed value for the metadata key.

For example:

Key,Value
key1,value1
...
keyN,valueN

RDF Metadata

This is an RDF document using the SKOS ontology.

A key is defined as a skos:ConceptScheme and a value as a skos:Concept. The labels are defined using skos:prefLabel predicates. A value is associated with a key using the skos:inScheme predicate. All other metadata triples are ignored.

For example, to support key=value a minimal RDF Turtle file is:

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .

<#> a skos:ConceptScheme ; skos:prefLabel "key" .

<#val> a skos:Concept ; skos:prefLabel "value" ; skos:inScheme <#> .

Configuration Options

These are the various valid values used by the command-line options, VIM syntax file and file-based metadata. See the appropriate sections on how to specify these values.

ACCENT

The supported ACCENT values are:

en-US to use the American English phone table;
en-GB-x-rp to use the Received Pronunciation British English phone table;
a CSV file to use phonesets defined in that CSV file (see Phone Table File Format for a description of this file format).

FORMAT

The supported FORMAT values are:

Format	Input	Output	Metadata	VIM	Description
`cmudict`	yes	yes	yes	yes	The current dictionary format as maintained by Alex Rudnicky (versions 0.7a and later).
`cmudict-weide`	yes	yes	yes	yes	The old dictionary format as maintained by Robert L. Weide and others (versions 0.1 through 0.7).
`cmudict-new`	yes	yes	yes	yes	The dictionary format as maintained by Nikolay V. Shmyrev.
`festlex`	yes	yes	no	no	The festival lexicon format for Scheme (`*.scm`) files.
`sphinx`	no	yes	no	no	The lexicon format used by sphinx4, phonetisaurus, etc.
`json`	no	yes	no	no	JSON formatted entries and validation errors.

METADATA

The METADATA value points to a metadata description file containing the valid (key,value) pairs for entry-based metadata.

To test the (key,value) extraction for a metadata description file, you can run:

python metadata.py <metadata-description-file>

This will output JSON text, for example:

{"key1": ["value1", "value2"], "key2": ["value3"]}

Additionally, @type:key can be used to specify keys that have arbitrary values of a regular format. Valid types are:

s for string values;
i for integer numbers (e.g. 274);
f for floating point numbers (e.g. 56.46325).

PHONESET

The supported PHONESET values depend on the phone table used. For the en-US and en-GB-x-rp phone tables defined by cmudict-tools, the supported phonesets are:

`PHONESET`	`ACCENT=en-US`	`ACCENT=en-GB-x-rp`	Description
`arpabet`	yes	yes	An expanded Arpabet-based phoneset.
`cepstral`	yes	yes	The phoneset used by the Cepstral Text-to-Speech program.
`cmu`	yes	no	The phoneset used by the official cmudict dictionary.
`festvox`	yes	no	The phoneset used by the festlex-cmu dictionary.
`ipa`	yes	yes	Use an IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription.
`timit`	yes	no	The phoneset used by the TIMIT database.

NOTE: The VIM syntax file does not support ipa phoneset validation.

SORT

The supported SORT values are:

air to use the new-style sort order (group variants next to their root entry);
none to leave the entries in the order they are in the dictionary;
unicode to use the new-style sort order (group variants next to their root entry) with words sorted using the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) to provide a more natural grouping of accented characters, etc.;

NOTE: This requires the pyicu package to be installed to be used.
weide to use the old-style sort order (simple ASCII character ordering).

WARNING

The supported WARNING values are:

`WARNING`	Description
`context-ordering`	Check context values are ordered sequentially.
`context-values`	Check context values are numbers.
`duplicate-entries`	Check for matching entries (word, context, pronunciation).
`duplicate-pronunciations`	Check for duplicated pronunciations for an entry.
`entry-spacing`	Check spacing between word and pronunciation.
`invalid-phonemes`	Check for invalid phonemes.
`missing-primary-stress`	Check for missing primary stress markers.
`missing-stress`	Check for missing stress markers.
`multiple-primary-stress`	Check for multiple primary stress markers.
`phoneme-spacing`	Check for a single space between phonemes.
`trailing-whitespace`	Check for trailing whitespaces.
`unsorted`	Check if a word is not sorted correctly.
`word-casing`	Check for consistent word casing.

NOTE: Currently, the unsorted check does not recognise the weide sort order.

If warn is used, the option is enabled. If no-warn is used, the option is disabled.

The following values have a special behaviour, and cannot be used with the no- prefix:

`WARNING`	Description
`all`	Enable all warnings.
`none`	Disable all warnings.

The order is important, as the warning set is tracked incrementally. This allows things like the following combinations:

Example	Description
`-Wnone -Winvalid-phonemes`	Only use the `invalid-phonemes` warning.
`-Wall -Wno-missing-stress`	Use all warnings except `missing-stress`.

License

The CMU Pronunciation Dictionary Tools are released under the GPL version 3 or later license.

hebbianloop / cmudict-tools