Festival's Lexicon

[Emily B]

How can we determine whether a particular word is in the lexicon/dictionary of the current Festival voice or has gone through Letter-to-Sound rules?

[Simon]

The function lex.lookup calls the complete LTS module that tries the lexicon and then calls the letter-to-sound model if the word is not found.

Use the lex.lookup_all function to only look in the dictionary. This will return ‘nil’ when the word is not found, rather than passing the word on to the letter-to-sound model.

[Alice W]

How can we set the variables when I want to lookup content as a noun?

[Simon]

You can simply use lex.lookup_all which shows you all available entries in the lexicon for a word:

festival> (lex.lookup_all "content")
(("content" jj (((k @ n) 0) ((t e n ?) 1)))
 ("content" nn (((k oo n) 1) ((t e n ?) 0)))
 ("content" vb (((k @ n) 0) ((t e n ?) 1)))
 ("content" vbp (((k @ n) 0) ((t e n ?) 1))))

[Vishnu M]

and what notation is festival using for transcribing i.e. (k@nten?) etc. because otherwise i dont know how to check online and compare to the proper pronunciation of a word. also i am not sure where to find the proper pronunciation of the word transcribed, i can listen to audio on most dictionary sites but cant see one with a transcription in ipa or somethng like that.

[Simon]

The best way to understand the phone set is to look up common words that you know. See also this topic.

The determine the correct pronunciation for a word not in the dictionary, a good technique is to look up similar-sounding words and assemble a pronunciation from parts of them. For example, to work out the pronunciation of “Simonification” (a word I just made up, but a plausible word in English), I would use lex.lookup_all to ensure I am only retrieving dictionary entries and not using G2P:

festival>  (lex.lookup_all "Simon")
(("simon" nnp (((s ae) 1) ((m @ n) 0))))

festival>  (lex.lookup_all "magnify")
(("magnify" vb (((m a g) 1) ((n i) 0) ((f ae) 0)))
 ("magnify" vbp (((m a g) 1) ((n i) 0) ((f ae) 0))))

festival>  (lex.lookup_all "classification")
(("classification" nn  (((k l a s) 2) ((i) 0) ((f i) 0) ((k ei) 1) ((sh n!) 0))))

from which I would decide that “Simonification” might be pronounced as

s ae m @ n i f i k ei sh n!

I could optionally refine that by thinking about syllabification or syllable stress (perhaps “Simonification” should have stress on the second syllable so the vowel should be full, not reduced to schwa @).

I could also compare this to what the G2P model predicts:

festival>  (lex.lookup "Simonification")              
("Simonification" nil (((s ae m) 0) ((oo n) 0) ((i f) 0) ((i k) 0) ((ei sh n!) 0)))

In this case, the prediction looks reasonable.

[Jiahn K]

Thank you for the answers.

Is it possible for Festival to use G2P for a word that is already in its dictionary and make a mistake?

[Simon]

No – if a word is in the dictionary then Festival will always use that in preference to G2P. This is true even if there is no dictionary entry with the required POS: it will then ignore POS and pick another entry.

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