Working Draft

Date: Mar. 12, 2001
Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/lexicon-reqs/
Source Author or Organization: W3C

This document, part of a set of specifications for voice browsers, gives the requirements for markup that is used to describe pronunciation lexica (in linguistics, a lexicon is the group of morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful word parts, for a specific language).

When Text-to-Speech systems read out sounds unsupported by the local hardware during voice browsing, the browsers will typically rely upon pronunciation generation algorithms. This generally produces a poorer result than the manual specification of additional pronunciations by developers. Pronunciation lexicon markup will give developers a standard, platform independent method for supplying additional pronunciations.