Gi2Pi Rule-based, index-preserving grapheme-to-phoneme transformations

AbstractThis paper describes the motivation and implementation details for a rule-based, index-preserving grapheme-to-phoneme engine ‘Gi2Pi' implemented in pure Python and released under the open source MIT license. The engine and interface have been designed to prioritize the developer experience of potential contributors without requiring a high level of programming knowledge. ‘Gi2Pi' already provides mappings for 30 (mostly Indigenous) languages, and the package is accompanied by a web-based interactive development environment, a RESTful API, and extensive documentation to encourage the addition of more mappings in the future. We also present three downstream applications of ‘Gi2Pi' and show results of a preliminary evaluation.