Automatic Transcription of Three Ambiguous Symbols Used with Arabic Numerals: Period, Colon and Slash.

아라비안 숫자를 동반한 중의적 기호의 자동전사: 온점, 쌍점, 빗금을 중심으로

In this paper, we have proposed Auto- TSS, an automatic transcription module of three ambiguous symbols-period (．), colon (:) and slash (／)--using their linguistic contexts. Few previous studies have discussed the problems of ambiguities in reading those symbols into Korean alphabetic letters in order to improve the current Korean TTS (Text-To-Speech) systems. We have classified 9 different reading formulae of the three symbols, analyzed their left and right contexts, and investigated selection rules and distributions between the symbols and their contexts. Based on these linguistic features, 30 stereotyped patterns, 53 rules and 5 heuristics determining the types of reading formulae are investigated for Auto-TSS. This module works modularly in 4 steps. The pilot test was conducted with three test suites, which contain respectively 6,979, 3,491 and 2,450 morpheme clusters containing at least one of three ambiguous symbols and Arabic numeral(s). Encouraging results of 94.3%, 93.0%, 94.2% accuracy were obtained for the test suites. Our next phases are to develop a guessing routine for unknown contexts of the union symbols by using statistical information; to refine the proper nouns and terminology detecting module; and to apply Auto-TSS on a larger scale.