The Dictionary Module - Overview

A dictionary (Dictionary) is a list of words (Word). A word consists of an orthographic spelling (name of the word) and a pronounciation (sequence of monophone names and sequence of tag names). A dictionary can be modified during runtime, however some other modules depend on it, such that the modification of a word's pronounciation might not have the desired effect without informing the dependen modules. Adding additional words to an existing dictionary should always work.

The dictionary module does not care about pronounciation variants. From the point of view of the dictionary module, these are simply different words with the same orthographic spelling and different pronounciations. When asking the dictionary about the pronounciation of a word, you will get the phoneme and tag sequence of the first entry that is found in the dictionary. The generic list module offers functions that can return the subsequent entries (which would be the variants, if present). A much more common way to use pronounciation variants is to add them explicitely with different spellings, i.e. add a suffix to every word's name indicating the variant. Usually this will be a parenthesized integer. In any case, the dictionary does not treat them specially. There are, however, features in the language model, which can take care of words that are 'suffixed' this way.

Further information about the module:
maintainer : Ivica Rogina
last update: Mon 17 June 1996