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I am looking for similarity metrics of phonemes (expressed in IPA) in English. In other words, given two phonemes A and B (both written), I want to know how similar they are based on some metric, M. For example, M(ɒ, oʊ) would yield a higher score than M(æ,ɔɪ).

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Distance metrics like Leveshtein or Hamming distance working on IPA phoneme symbols are simply comparing arbitrary symbols; and the phoneme /a/ would be as distant from /b/ as the much closer /p/ would be. Also, most of these metrics only work on sequences of phonemes, not individual phonemes.

What I would do is to describe each phoneme by a feature vector, including

  • place of articulation (labiar, alveolar, etc)
  • voiced/unvoiced
  • type of articulation (plosive, fricative, etc)

You can then use a distance metric on this feature vector to decide how similar phonemes are. For example:

  1. /b/: bilabial, plosive, voiced
  2. /s/: dental, fricative, unvoiced
  3. /p/: bilabial, plosive, unvoiced

A simple binary measure would easily tell you that /b/ and /p/ are closer to each other than /b/ and /s/. A suitable metric to use would be the Dice coefficient.

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