Generating Phonetic Embeddings for Bulgarian Words with Neural Networks

Word embeddings can be considered the cornerstone of modern natural language processing. They are used in many NLP tasks and allow us to create models that can understand the meaning of words. Most word embeddings model the semantics of the words. In this paper, we create phoneme-based word embeddings, which model how a word sounds. This is accomplished by training a neural network that can automatically generate transcriptions of Bulgarian words. We used the Jaccard index and direct comparison metrics to measure the performance of neural networks. The models perform nearly perfectly with the task of generating transcriptions. The model’s word embeddings offer versatility across various applications, with its application in automatic paronym detection being particularly notable, as well as the task of detecting the language of origin of a Bulgarian word. The performance of this paronym detection is measured with the standard classifier metrics - accuracy, precision, recall, and F1.