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<Paper uid="C00-2171">
  <Title>Incorporating Metaphonemes in a Multilingual Lexicon</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="1129" end_page="1129" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we have discussed the concept of metaphonemes. Metaphonemes are cross-linguistic phoneme correspondences such as the English/{/, the Dutch/A/, and the German/a/correspondence inentioned above. At the lnultilingual level, the realisation of the metaphoneme is conditioned by the choice of language. At the lower monolingual level its realisation as an allophone of a particular phoneme is conditioned by the phonological enviromnent. As such, a metaphoneme is a generalisation of a generalisation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We have shown how a metaphoneme inventory can be defined for a group of languages and that incorporating these cross-linguistic phoneme correspondences in a multilingual inheritance lexicon increases the number of generalisations that can be captured. Calculations on the syllable inventories of Dutch, English, and German in the CELEX database show that the introduction of metaphonemes increases the amount of sharing at the syllable level by about 25%.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Another benefit of introducing metaphonemes is improved robustness in NLP systems. Knowledge about cross-linguistic commonalities can help to provide grounds for making an &amp;quot;intelligent&amp;quot; guess when a lexical item for a particular language is not present.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Tiffs research has concentrated on cross-linguistic vowel phoneme correspondences. Similar research will be done for consonants.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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