| Abstract
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Anapron is a name-pronunciation system bas … Anapron is a name-pronunciation system based on a general method for combiningrule-based and case-based reasoning. An experiment was run to see how thissystem compares with existing systems for name pronunciation. Seven suchsystems were tested: three state-of-the-art commercial systems (fromBellcore, Bell Labs, and DEC), two variants of a machine-learning system(NETtalk), and two humans. Each system was run on the same 400-name test set.The acceptability of its pronunciations was evaluated by a panel of 14 testsubjects. To hide the identities of the systems, the order of systems wasrandomized for each test name, and all pronunciations were read by the DECtalkspeech synthesizer. The main result was that Anapron was found to performalmost at the level of the commercial systems, and significantly better thanthe two versions of NETtalk. ly better thanthe two versions of NETtalk.
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