Automatic Generation of English Respellings

Bradley Hauer and Greg Kondrak

A respelling is an alternative spelling of a word in the same writing system, intended to clarify pronunciation. We introduce the task of automatic generation of a respelling from the word's phonemic representation. Our approach combines machine learning with linguistic constraints and electronic resources. We evaluate our system both intrinsically through a human judgment experiment, and extrinsically by passing its output to a letter-to-phoneme converter. The results show that the forms generated by our system are better on average than those found on the Web, and approach the quality of respellings designed by an expert.