PanPhon: A Resource for Mapping IPA Segments to Articulatory Feature Vectors

AbstractThis paper contributes to a growing body of evidence that—when coupled with appropriate machine-learning techniques–linguistically motivated, information-rich representations can outperform one-hot encodings of linguistic data. In particular, we show that phonological features outperform character-based models. PanPhon is a database relating over 5,000 IPA segments to 21 subsegmental articulatory features. We show that this database boosts performance in various NER-related tasks. Phonologically aware, neural CRF models built on PanPhon features are able to perform better on monolingual Spanish and Turkish NER tasks that character-based models. They have also been shown to work well in transfer models (as between Uzbek and Turkish). PanPhon features also contribute measurably to Orthography-to-IPA conversion tasks.