RUSSIAN PRONUNCIATION DICTIONARY

If you prefer reading this info in Russian, you find it in the
separate file README.ru.

Russian pronunciation dictionary RuLex is aimed primarily for use
together with the Russian TTS engine Ru_tts. When it is installed you
can instruct Ru_tts to use the dictionary by the command line switch
"-s /usr/local/share/freespeech/rulex.db".


The lexical database consists of two dictionaries and four sets of
rules. Subdirectory data contains source files of all these datasets
along with the test dictionary in source format. Dictionary source
format is as follows:

The dictionary source must be represented by a text file in koi8-r.
Each entry occupies exactly one line consisting of two fields
separated by space. The first field contains word itself and is used
as a key. The second field tells how this word should be
uttered. Stresses are denoted by the "+" sign following the stressed
letter. In such a manner you can use the "=" sign as well to denote
so-called weak stresses where it is appropriate, for instance, in some
complex words. In the key field only lowercase Russian letters are
allowed. In the utterance field additional characters "+", "=" and "-"
may be used as well. The "-" sign can serve as a separator in some
complex words.

For Ru_tts synthesizer could use the lexical database it must be
compiled. This is as simple as

make db

The file lexicon containing the lexical database will be created in
the data subdirectory as a result of these manipulations.

To install lexical database issue the command:

make install-db

Of course, this command should be performed with the superuser
privileges.

To recompile the lexholder utility issue the command:

make lexholder

To compile and install all stuff issue command:

make install

Of course, this command requires superuser privileges.

Along with the lexical database itself the package includes some
supporting tools, such as utility lexholder-ru, which allows updating
and extending the lexical database as well as extracting the database
content in textual form. This utility can be used either from command
line or from a shell-script. For information about it's using try

lexholder-ru -h

Or consult README.ru for the detailed description in Russian. Anyway, I
think, it would unlikely be useful for those who do not speak Russian.

Note 1. If you wish Ru_tts to make use of the lexical database created
by the lexholder-ru utility, they both must use the same database
support library. The version also makes sense. Usually it is expected
that the new version library routines can read the files created by
the ones of older versions, but it is not necessarily true. Detailed
information about used libraries for dynamically linked binaries can
be obtained by the "ldd" command.

Note 2. The lexical data storage format was changed in RuLex version
2.0. The new format can not be used by Ru_tts older than 2.0.

Note 3. The lexholder-ru utility does not free disk space when
database records are modified or  deleted. Moreover, the database
size can grow dramatically during multiple updates. More compact
representation in this case can be achieved by the following steps:

1) Clean the database.

2) Extract all the datasets.

3) Recreate the database.


A little history

This dictionary was initially created as an attempt to provide some
stressing capability to the Ru_tts speech engine. My search through
the internet for some Russian stress dictionary had no practical
result. But then I've remembered that one of freely distributed
versions of Mueller's English-Russian dictionary actually contains the
desired information. I've extracted this stuff and got stress
dictionary about 60000 entries. It was not so much, but, anyway, I
already could see how the idea works. It became clear soon that there
are many special cases: some words should not be stressed at all and
the dictionary should contain not only stressing information. So, now
it is positioned as a pronunciation dictionary (not only stressing)
and it had grown dramatically since that time.

At some point I decided to extend the plain dictionary by some rules
allowing to guess pronunciation for some implicit word forms as well
as for the words where it can be done by formal criterions. As a
result, overall database size was greatly reduced, but the database
itself became more informative. And the old pronunciation dictionary
now serves for the database testing.


Now I'd like to thank all who helped me in this work:

The authors and publishers of the electronic version of Mueller's
dictionary with stress information, from which I obtained the initial
portion of stressed words;

Ivanov Guennady and my sister Tatyana, who had accomplished a lot of
hard work fixing and extending the dictionary at the beginning time;

Serge Fleytin, who provided me a bunch of new entries;

Dmitry Paduchih, who not only provided me new entries for the
dictionary, but had also developed the Emacs extension helping to
generate ones. This extension is included into the package and
Dmitry's comments about it are at the end of this file (in the Russian
section).

Igor B. Poretsky <poretsky@mlbox.ru>