Reference: Golding, A. R. & Rosenbloom, P. S. A Comparison of Anapron with Seven Other Name-Pronounciation Systems. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, April, 1991.
Abstract: Anapron is a name-pronunciation system based on a general method for combining rule-based and case-based reasoning. An experiment was run to see how this system compares with existing systems for name pronunciation. Seven such systems were tested: three state-of-the-art commercial systems (from Bellcore, Bell Labs, and DEC), two variants of a machine-learning system (NETtalk), and two humans. Each system was run on the same 400-name test set. The acceptability of its pronunciations was evaluated by a panel of 14 test subjects. To hide the identities of the systems, the order of systems was randomized for each test name, and all pronunciations were read by the DECtalk speech synthesizer. The main result was that Anapron was found to perform almost at the level of the commercial systems, and significantly better than the two versions of NETtalk.