Digital Pronunciation Dictionary in Bangla for Computer Assisted Language Teaching, E-Learning, and Speech Technology

It will be a nice learning experience for the Bangla language learners if an on-line Bangla education system is supported with a Digital Bangla Pronunciation Dictionary (DBPD), which is accessed in classroom and at home, as the case may be, as one of the most useful reference guides for learning standard and acceptable pronunciation of Bangla words. Keeping this idea at background, in this paper, we have made an attempt to report the design architecture of the proposed digital Bangla pronunciation dictionary, which is being developed with a large lexical database of nearly hundred thousand words that are directly obtained from a digital corpus of Bangla written texts as well as from other digital lexical sources available in the language. This is perhaps the first attempt ever made for any of the Indian languages with a mission for serving the Bangla speakers as well as Bangla language learners with better learning resources and devices for the language across the world. The immediate application of the resource is visualized as a tool for e-governance and on-line language teaching where the learners can access this device to address various linguistic purposes including spelling, pronunciation, part-of-speech, meaning, and usage of words.