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François YVON
Ph.D. Student
Biography
Born 1964 in Poitiers, France, François YVON graduated from the Ecole
Polytechnique in 1987, and from the Ecole Nationale de Statistique et
d'Administration Economique (ENSAE) in 1989. During the same period,
he worked as Research Associate in a Social Science Laboratory, where
his main research topic was the automatic treatment of open questions
in surveys using lexicometric methods. After three years as Project
Manager in the Pharmaceutical Industry, he joined TELECOM Paris in 1992
to start a Ph.D in computationnal Linguistics under the direction of
Pr. A. BONNET. Since then, his research activity has been devoted to
the question of grapheme to phoneme transcription of proper names
(people first and last names, place names and acronyms) for speech synthesis.
This includes both a careful study of specific morphological, phonological
and syntactical properties of these ``weird'' linguistic componants, and a
study of self-learning techniques that could help to carry out phonemic
transcription.
He is is also responsible for building a 1 million entries lexicon
(including a phonemic transcription) of French proper names, within the
LRE project ONOMASTICA.
Thesis director : Alain BONNET
Research Group : MILC
Laboratory : Département Informatique, TELECOM Paris
Intended examination date : December 1995
Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion Systems for Proper Names
Pronuncing proper names (patronyms, toponyms or acronyms) is
commonly known to be a difficult task for many speech synthesis systems.
These difficulties have numerous causes, such as exotic etymologies or the
vagueness of the concept of "a good pronunciation for a name", etc.
The goal of this PhD work is to explore and/or implement systems
(either rule or analogy based) specifically devoted to the grapheme to
phoneme conversion of these weird linguistic entities; systems which
would be of great interest for the development of name intensive real
word text-to-speech applications.
- F. Yvon, (1997)
"Paradigmatic Cascades: A Linguistically Sound Model of Pronunciation by Analogy", in the proceedings of ACL/EACL'97, Madrid, juillet 97.
- E. Valencia et F. Yvon, (1997)
"Identification de l'origine linguistique : le cas des noms propres", actes des journées Francil 97, Avignon, avril 97.
- V. Baudoin et F. Yvon, (1996)
"The metrometer: a tool for analysing French Verse". In Literary
and Linguistic Computing, 11 (1), janvier 1996.
- S. Federici, V. Pirrelli et F. Yvon, (1996)
"A dynamic approach to paradigm-driven analogy", in Connectionist,
statistical, and symbolic approaches to learning for natural language
processing, Stefan Wermter, Ellen Riloff and Gabriele Scheler
(Editors), Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1996.
- F. Yvon, (1996)
"Lire les sigles : pour une approche à base de
contrainte", actes du séminaire "Lexique et Communication Parlée" du
PRC-CHM, Toulouse, octobre 96.
- F. Yvon, (1996)
"Grapheme to phoneme conversion using multiple unbounded overlapping
chunks", in the proceedings of NemLap'96, Ankara, septembre 96.
- S. Deligne, F. Yvon, F. Bimbot, (1996)
"Concatenative and
overlapping variable-length sequence models and their applications to
transduction". Proceedings of ICGI'96. Montpellier, septembre 96.
- S. Federici, V. Pirrelli, F. Yvon, (1995)
"Advances in analogy-based learning: false friends and exceptional
items in pronunciation by paradigm-driven analogy", in the
Proceeding of the IJCAI 95 workshop on "New Approaches to Learning
for Natural Language Processing", pp. 158-163, Montréal,
août 95.
- S. Deligne, F. Yvon, F. Bimbot, (1995)
"Phonetic transcription by variable length sequences: Comultigrams",
in the Proceeding of the Eurospeech 95,vol.3,
pp.2243-2246, Madrid, septembre 95.
- S. Deligne, F. Yvon, F. Bimbot, (1995)
"Unsupervised Decomposition of Phoneme Strings into variable length
sequences, by multigrams", in the Proceeding of the International
Congress of Phonetic Science (ICPhS), Stockholm, 1995.
- V. Baudoin et F. Yvon, (1995)
"Le métromètre et les douze positions alexandrines",
in Cahiers de Poétique comparée [Mezura n. 32],
Paris, février 95.
- F. Yvon, (1994)
"Règles de Transcription graphème-phonème pour la prononciation
automatique de sigles", in LYNX, n 30, décembre 1994.
Last changes November 30 1994
François Yvon (yvon@inf.enst.fr)