47 Niladri Sekhar Dash, Arpita Chakraborty Research Cell : An International Journal of Engineering Sciences, Issue December 2016 ISSN: 2229-6913 (Print), ISSN: 2320-0332 (Online) -, Web Presence: http://www.ijoes.vidyapublications.com © 2016 Vidya Publications. Authors are responsible for any plagiarism issues. Digital Pronunciation Dictionary in Bangla for Computer Assisted Language Teaching, E-Learning, and Speech Technology Niladri Sekhar Dash 1 and Arpita Chakraborty 2 Linguistic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata 1 Intern at LRU, ISI, Kolkata, S/W Developer at R&D Lab, Kolkata 2 Email: ns_dash@yahoo.com 1 , c.arpita23@gmail.com 2 ABSTRACT 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. Keywords: pronunciation, part-of-speech, transliteration, orthography, IPA, meaning 1. INTRODUCTION The Digital Bangla Pronunciation Dictionary (DBPD) that we are engaged in developing is capable of capturing the unique aspects of the pronunciation of the Bangla words with due reference to their parts of speech, meaning, and usage. At the orthography level each and every headword included in this dictionary is represented in two different scripts: (a) The Unicode compatible standard Bangla script for the native Bangla speakers and the others who know the language and its script. (b) The Indic Roman script marked with diacritics for those people who do not know the Bangla script but know the Indic Roman characters. On the other hand, the pronunciation of the headwords, following the process adopted in the Oxford English Dictionary, is represented in the following three ways: