Romanian phonetic transcription dictionary for speeding up language technology development

This paper intends to present a machine readable Romanian language pronunciation dictionary called NaviRo. The dictionary contains 138,500 unique words from the DexOnline dictionary together with their phonetic transcriptions in speech assessment method phonetic alphabet. The development of the pronunciation dictionary and the performed validation tests are also described in the paper. NaviRo pronunciation dictionary is freely available on the project website (http://users.utcluj.ro/~jdomokos/naviro) in plain text, Hidden Markov Model Toolkit and Festival speech synthesis system dictionary format. There are also available for download the used grapheme and phoneme sets and the audio samples for the used phonemes. The use of these resources is completely unrestricted for any research purposes in order to speed up Romanian language speech technology research.