• Usage
• VIM Syntax File
• CMU Pronunciation Dictionary File Format
  • Metadata
• File-Based Metadata
  • format
  • metadata
• Phone Table File Format
• Metadata Description File Format
  • CSV Metadata
  • RDF Metadata
• Configuration Options
  • ACCENT
  • FORMAT
  • PHONESET
  • SORT
  • WARNING
• License

This is a collection of tools for working with the CMU Pronunciation Dictionary.

The cmudict-tools program has the following command-line structure:

cmudict-tools [OPTIONS] COMMAND DICTIONARY

The supported OPTIONS are:

COMMAND can be one of:

The DICTIONARY file is auto-detected according to one of the supported input FORMAT values.

The SELECTOR value can be:

NOTE: The select command can be used to extract the data used to test a Porter stemmer algorithm. For example:

./cmudict-tools select=word cmudict > in.txt
./cmudict-tools select="@stem|word" cmudict > out.txt

The cmudict-tools project provides a syntax highlighting file for cmudict-style dictionaries.

You can install the files to a VIM install by running:

make VIMDIR=<path-to-vim> vim

Alternatively, if your system supports VIM addons (e.g. Debian Linux), you can install the files by running:

make vim_plugin

which installs the files to /usr/share/vim. If the addon files are not in this location, you need to point VIMDIR to the addons directory and VIMPLUGINDIR to the registry directory.

Once installed, it will automatically highlight files named cmudict. You can explicitly enable highlighting by using the VIM command:

set ft=cmudict

The following variables and file-based metadata are supported:

NOTE: The file-based metadata must occur within the first 5 lines of the file to be supported by the VIM syntax file.

If no FORMAT is specified, its value is determined based on the content. This logic has rules for the old Weide format as well as the new formats (both the currently maintained dictionary and cmudict-new formats). Additionally, it detects files containing Pronunciation Dictionary within a ;;; comment as cmudict documents.

NOTE: You need to set the variables before setting the filetype. For example:

let b:cmudict_phoneset="arpabet"
set ft=cmudict

Alternatively, you can set this information as file-based metadata. For example:

;;;@@ phoneset=arpabet @@

A line comment starts with ;;; and spans until the end of the current line. In the cmudict-weide format, a line comment starts with ##.

An entry has the form ENTRY PRONUNCIATION, where ENTRY consists of WORD for the primary entry for the word, or WORD(VARIANT) for an alternate entry. The ENTRY and PRONUNCIATION are separated by two space ( ) characters and ENTRY is in upper case. In the cmudict-new format, ENTRY and PRONUNCIATION are separated by a single space ( ) character and ENTRY is in lower case.

The VARIANT consists of a number from 1 to 9 that denotes an alternate entry. These are numbered consecutively from 1 in the current cmudict format and from 2 in the cmudict-weide and cmudict-new formats.

The PRONUNCIATION section consists of Arpabet-based phones separated by a single space ( ). The casing of the phones depends on the phoneset being used. The vowels have an additional stress marker, which can be:

• 0 for an unstressed vowel;
• 1 for a primary stressed vowel;
• 2 for a secondary stressed vowel.

An entry may have a comment. These comments start with # and span to the end of the line.

NOTE: The various releases of the cmudict contain various formatting errors in several entries, where those entries deviate from the format described here. These will show up as validation warnings when those dictionary versions are run through cmudict-tools with the appropriate validation warnings enabled.

Metadata is not supported in the official CMU dictionary format. However, the cmudict-tools project interprets specifically formatted comments as metadata. This allows additional information to be provided in a way that is compatible with existing cmudict tools.

Metadata occurs in line comments for file-based metadata, or entry comments for entry-based metadata. The metadata section of the comment starts and ends with @@. The @@ must be at the start of the comment (i.e. no spaces or other characters) for it to be recognised as metadata. Any text after the metadata is treated as a regular comment.

The content within the metadata block is a sequence of space-separated key=value pairs. A key can occur multiple times, in which case the key will have both values.

This is metadata on line comments in the given dictionary format. This metadata is used to control the cmudict-tools behaviour.

The format metadata key overrides the auto-detected file format. It only applies to the cmudict-based formats. See FORMAT for supported values.

The metadata metadata key points to a metadata description file containing the valid (key,value) pairs for entry-based metadata.

To test the (key,value) extraction for a metadata description file, you can run:

python metadata.py <metadata-description-file>

This will output JSON text, for example:

{"key1": ["value1", "value2"], "key2": ["value3"]}

Additionally, @type:key can be used to specify keys that have arbitrary values of a regular format. Valid types are:

• s for string values;
• i for integer numbers (e.g. 274);
• f for floating point numbers (e.g. 56.46325).

This is a CSV document with the first line containing the titles of each field. At a minimum, it needs to support the following fields:

• Arpabet is the phone using an upper-case Arpabet transcription, excluding the stress marker;
• Normalized is the optional canonical form for phonesets that use a different transcription for a given phone;
• IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription for the phone excluding stress markers;
• Type is the phone type (see below) of the given phone;
• Phone Sets is a semi-colon (;) separated list of phonesets that support this phone.

The supported values for the Type field are:

• vowel to indicate a phone that can have a stress marker;
• consonant to indicate a phone that cannot have a stress marker;
• schwa to indicate a phone that can either have no stress marker, or the unstressed (0) stress marker.

For example:

Arpabet,Normalized,IPA,Type,Phone Sets
AA,,ɑ,vowel,arpabet;ipa;cmu;festvox;cepstral;timit
AE,,æ,vowel,arpabet;ipa;cmu;festvox;cepstral;timit

NOTE: The Turtle and RDF/XML formats require the rapper command-line application. This is so those formats can be converted to the N-Triple format.

This is a CSV document with the first line containing the titles of each field. At a minimum, it needs to support the following fields:

• Key is the metadata key;
• Value is an allowed value for the metadata key.

For example:

Key,Value
key1,value1
...
keyN,valueN

This is an RDF document using the SKOS ontology.

A key is defined as a skos:ConceptScheme and a value as a skos:Concept. The labels are defined using skos:prefLabel predicates. A value is associated with a key using the skos:inScheme predicate. All other metadata triples are ignored.

For example, to support key=value a minimal RDF Turtle file is:

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .

<#> a skos:ConceptScheme ; skos:prefLabel "key" .

<#val> a skos:Concept ; skos:prefLabel "value" ; skos:inScheme <#> .

These are the various valid values used by the command-line options, VIM syntax file and file-based metadata. See the appropriate sections on how to specify these values.

The supported ACCENT values are:

• en-US to use the American English phone table;
• en-GB-x-rp to use the Received Pronunciation British English phone table;
• a CSV file to use phonesets defined in that CSV file (see Phone Table File Format for a description of this file format).

The supported FORMAT values are:

The supported PHONESET values depend on the phone table used. For the en-US and en-GB-x-rp phone tables defined by cmudict-tools, the supported phonesets are:

NOTE: The VIM syntax file does not support ipa phoneset validation.

The supported SORT values are:

• air to use the new-style sort order (group variants next to their root entry);
• none to leave the entries in the order they are in the dictionary;
• weide to use the old-style sort order (simple ASCII character ordering).

The supported WARNING values are:

If warn is used, the option is enabled. If no-warn is used, the option is disabled.

The following values have a special behaviour, and cannot be used with the no- prefix:

The order is important, as the warning set is tracked incrementally. This allows things like the following combinations:

The CMU Pronunciation Dictionary Tools are released under the GPL version 3 or later license.

Copyright (C) 2015 Reece H. Dunn