| Development and maintenance for cmudict
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| [20100118] (air)
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| The maintainer is responsible for acquiring and vetting new entries,
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| and for fixing errors that they otherwise encounter.
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| At this point, the cmudict project has been incrementally
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| re-organized; maintenance has been simplified and several aspects have
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| been automated. The scripts/ folder contains instructions and scripts
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| for routine maintenance. It has everything you should need to get
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| started.
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| Version numbers and files
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| There is no particular rule for incrementing the version number. To
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| date the minor version (letter suffix) has been incremented to reflect
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| changes in maintainers. Major version increments (right now, the
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| decimal) are incurred when some (subjectively) large change
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| occurs. For example, the 0.6
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| number of new entries and by the removal of many incorrect entries
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| from the preceeding 0.6e version.
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| The cmudict.*.phones file lists all legal phones, plus their phonetic class.
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| The cmudict.*.symbols file lists all legal phonetic symbols (the only
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| substantive difference is that stress combinations are explicitly noted).
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| Projects for the ambitious
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| 1. Change the current flat-file version to a database format. This
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| should still allow producing a flat file, but it will simplify adding
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| useful information to the dictionary. Some possible data includes:
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| a. part-of-speech information
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| b. domain information (e.g., location, medical, non-english, etc)
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| c. spelling variants
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| d. source information (who, when, ...)
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| e. probabilities for pronunciation variants
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| There's additional stuff that can be done but the above bits seem the
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| most useful ones. I also have ideas on how to do it, so feel free to
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| get in touch (air at cs cmu edu).
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| 2. Create an OS independent GUI for managing the database. This should
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| allow the maintainer to view and modify entries, while dealing with
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| bookkeeping. It would be nice if the GUI included a synthesizer so
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| that entries can be checked by listening.
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| Reductions
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| CMUDict tries to be phonetic dictionary and account for possible phonetic
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| reductions like
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| N T -> N intersomething countersomething
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| IH -> AH lots of examples
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| EH -> AH lots of examples
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| AE -> EH happens sometimes
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| However, this is not done in a consistent way yet. So sometimes both
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| reduced and original version is present in the dictionary, sometimes
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| only original or only reduced based on perceived frequency in read speech.
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| This situation might improve in the future
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