The Development of a Comprehensive Spanish Dictionary for Phonetic and Lexical Tagging in Socio-phonetic Research (ESPADA)

TL;DR

This paper introduces ESPADA, a comprehensive open-source Spanish pronunciation dictionary with over 628,000 entries covering 16 countries, designed to improve phonetic and lexical analysis in socio-phonetic research.

Contribution

The creation of ESPADA, the largest and most inclusive Spanish pronunciation dictionary, integrating dialectal variations, morphological, lexical, and phonetic annotations for socio-phonetic studies.

Findings

Over 628,000 entries covering 16 countries

Enhanced dialectal and phonetic analysis capabilities

Open-source resource for socio-phonetic research

Abstract

Pronunciation dictionaries are an important component in the process of speech forced alignment. The accuracy of these dictionaries has a strong effect on the aligned speech data since they help the mapping between orthographic transcriptions and acoustic signals. In this paper, I present the creation of a comprehensive pronunciation dictionary in Spanish (ESPADA) that can be used in most of the dialect variants of Spanish data. Current dictionaries focus on specific regional variants, but with the flexible nature of our tool, it can be readily applied to capture the most common phonetic differences across major dialectal variants. We propose improvements to current pronunciation dictionaries as well as mapping other relevant annotations such as morphological and lexical information. In terms of size, it is currently the most complete dictionary with more than 628,000 entries, representing words from 16 countries. All entries come with their corresponding pronunciations, morphological and lexical tagging, and other relevant information for phonetic analysis: stress patterns, phonotactics, IPA transcriptions, and more. This aims to equip socio-phonetic researchers with a complete open-source tool that enhances dialectal research within socio-phonetic frameworks in the Spanish language.