LLM-Powered Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion: Benchmark and Case Study
This work addresses G2P conversion for speech processing applications, offering incremental improvements in performance for languages like Persian.
The paper tackles grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for speech synthesis by evaluating LLMs and introducing prompting and post-processing methods, showing that LLMs outperform traditional tools in Persian, an underrepresented language.
Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion is critical in speech processing, particularly for applications like speech synthesis. G2P systems must possess linguistic understanding and contextual awareness of languages with polyphone words and context-dependent phonemes. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated significant potential in various language tasks, suggesting that their phonetic knowledge could be leveraged for G2P. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of LLMs in G2P conversion and introduce prompting and post-processing methods that enhance LLM outputs without additional training or labeled data. We also present a benchmarking dataset designed to assess G2P performance on sentence-level phonetic challenges of the Persian language. Our results show that by applying the proposed methods, LLMs can outperform traditional G2P tools, even in an underrepresented language like Persian, highlighting the potential of developing LLM-aided G2P systems.