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	      PRONUNCIATIONS DICTIONARY FOR PROPER NOUNS
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	This directory contains the surname-pronunciations database as
described below.

	The required format of the phonetic transcriptions is 

name_spelling        phonetic_transcription 

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file: pronunciation_dictionaries.tar.gz

         This file contains the full data set, with 18494 surnames and
            24040 pronunciations. The training set consists of 15000
            names, and the test set is the remaining 3494 names. There
            are three such training and test sets. They have been
            divided such that each of the three test sets are
            disjoint.

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file: names_128.text

		 This file contains 128 words,each of which are four
	 letters long, that we often use for preliminary experiments
	 with neural networks as well as decision trees.

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file: names_4test.text 

    This file contains 408 words used for preliminary experiments with
 neural networks as well as decision trees in the testing mode.

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file: names_4train.text 

   This file contains 1611 words used for preliminary experiments with
 neural networks as well as decision trees in the training mode.

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file: proper_nouns.tar.gz 

	A list  of proper nouns --- contains  geographic names as well
as surnames of people. 
 
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file: align.tar.gz 

	Simple Viterbi  source code to insert blank  phones "_" in the
appropriate  places in the pronunciations  to align them with the name
spelling. 
 
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HELP / BUG REPORTS
******************
 
        Please email to
 
                help@isip.msstate.edu
 
for help or further information regarding this database.
 
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