The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (also known as CMUdict) is an
open-source pronouncing
dictionary
A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...
originally created by the Speech Group at
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...
(CMU) for use in
speech recognition research.
CMUdict provides a mapping orthographic/phonetic for English words in their North American pronunciations. It is commonly used to generate representations for
speech recognition (ASR), e.g. the
CMU Sphinx system, and
speech synthesis (TTS), e.g. the
Festival
A festival is an event celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, Melā, mela, or Muslim holidays, eid. A ...
system. CMUdict can be used as a training corpus for building statistical grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) models that will generate pronunciations for words not yet included in the dictionary.
The most recent release is 0.7b; it contains over 134,000 entries. An interactive lookup version is available.
[
]
Database format
The database is distributed as a plain text file with one entry to a line in the format "
WORD " with a two-space separator between the parts. If multiple pronunciations are available for a word, variants are identified using numbered versions (e.g.
WORD(1)). The pronunciation is encoded using a modified form of the
ARPABET system, with the addition of stress marks on vowels of levels 0, 1, and 2. A line-initial
;;; token indicates a comment. A derived format, directly suitable for speech recognition engines is also available as part of the distribution; this format collapses stress distinctions (typically not used in ASR).
The following is a table of phonemes used by CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
History
Applications
* The
Unifon converter is based on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
* The
Natural Language Toolkit contains an interface to the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
* The Carnegie Mellon
Logios[{{Cite web , url=https://cmusphinx.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cmusphinx/trunk/logios/ , title=Cmusphinx - Revision 10973: /Trunk/Logios , access-date=2009-12-19 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110520085139/https://cmusphinx.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cmusphinx/trunk/logios/ , archive-date=2011-05-20 , url-status=dead ] tool incorporates the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
PronunDict a pronunciation dictionary of American English, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary as its data source. Pronunciation is transcribed in
IPA symbols. This dictionary also supports searching by pronunciation.
* Some singing voice synthesizer software like
CeVIO Creative Studio and
Synthesizer V uses modified version of CMU Pronouncing Dictionary for synthesizing English singing voices.
Transcriber a tool for the full text phonetic transcription, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
*
15.ai, a real-time text-to-speech tool using artificial intelligence, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
See also
*
Moby Pronunciator, a similar project
References
External links
* The current version of the dictionary is a
SourceForge although there is also a version maintained o
GitHubHomepage– includes database search
RDFconverted to
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a method to describe and exchange graph data. It was originally designed as a data model for metadata by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It provides a variety of syntax notations and formats, of whi ...
by the open source
Texai project.
English pronouncing dictionaries
Natural language processing
Public domain databases
Carnegie Mellon University
Software using the BSD license