
INTRODUCTION

This module implements a variation on the context-based rule invocation
described by Chomsky and Halle in ``The Sound Pattern of English''.
It uses the OOP (Object Oriented Programming) interface introduced
with perl5.


MANIFEST

This directory contains the following files:

This file (README).
A rule interpreter in Perl (RuleEng.pm).
An example rule set for American English (english_rules).
An example rule set for French (french_rules).
A very small demo program (transcribe).
A file explaining english phoneme schemes (phoncode.doc).


INSTALLATION

You need to have Perl5.001 or better.

It's very simple. Put RuleEng.pm in /usr/local/lib/perl5/Ling or wherever
your perl5 directory happens to be. You will almost certainly have to
create the Ling directory.

There is some limited documentation. Do ``perldoc RuleEng''.

ENGLISH PHONESET

This has been derived from the following document (via a package called
``phon'' that is available on the internet):

             AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION OF ENGLISH TEXT TO PHONETICS
                    BY MEANS OF LETTER-TO-SOUND RULES

                        NRL Report 7948

                      January 21st, 1976
            Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C.


        Published by the National Technical Information Service as
        document "AD/A021 929".

The file phoncode.doc gives an explanation of phonetic symbols used
in the rules (the MRPA ones).

FRENCH PHONESET

This was taken from Thierry DUTOIT's Ph.D. thesis (available by ftp from
tcts.fpms.ac.be). Corrections and improvements are due to David
HAUBENSACK. For a more complete implementation of French high-level
synthesis, see David's implementation.

AUTHOR

Alistair Conkie (adc@cstr.ed.ac.uk)

If you find this program useful and use it to help generate a rule set I
would be interested in adding your rule set to the distribution.
