Words with empty pronunciation

[Rémi Francis]

In the Kaldi documentation: http://kaldi-asr.org/doc/graph_recipe_test.html#graph_lexicon there is:

Notice that we allow words with empty phonetic representations.

However, in utils/validate_dict_dir.pl, there is (line 189):

    if (@col == 0) {

      print "--> ERROR: lexicon.txt contains word $word with empty ";

      print "pronunciation.\n";

      set_to_fail();

    }

 Is the doc outdated, or are the empty pronunciations allowed only for words like "<s>", "</s>" and "#0"?

[Daniel Povey]

They are outdated. I think currently we never list those types of
words in the lexicon, only in the word-list. I created an issue for
it.
Dan

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[Rémi Francis]

Thanks I see.

So why are words with empty pronunciation forbidden? With disambiguation symbols it should be possible to deal with them properly.

[Daniel Povey]

Because they would cause lattice word alignment to fail.
Dan

[Rémi Francis]

Thanks I see.