Optimising Tools for the French Letter-to-Phone Grammar TOPH With a View to Phonographic Spelling Correction

The goal ,in the long term, of this work is to give a formal and linguistic description of the text-to-phone processing, and to use the description in a view to phonographic spelling correction errors. This description can be formulated, by TOPH language, in a determinist grammar. The French letter-to-phone exhaustive grammar TOPH is the base of our work in phonographic spelling correction: the inverse grammar PHOT gives the phone-to-letter correspondences. However, as it was constructed by human expert, TOPH has many redundant and incoherent rules which affect correction results. By eliminating these rules we got an optimal grammar to be used in the spelling correction. We have developed an environment around a French letter-to-phone system, which enables to filter the redundancies and the incoherences in a lexical grammar written in TOPH language. The result is an optimal grammar in its logic and linguistic description. Such an environment had never been developed for a French letter-to-phone system. We use this exhaustive phonetic description to establish the duality between letter-to-phone processing and phone-to-letter one, with a view to phonographic spelling correction.