Research & Open Source

Sawtone: A universal framework for phonetic similarity and alignment across languages and scripts

Lingua Posnaniensis, Vol. 67, Issue 1, pp. 165-200 (2025)

Processing text across different scripts presents significant hurdles in natural language processing, especially when dealing with non-standardized orthographies and informal writing systems common in low-resource languages. To address this, we introduce Sawtone, an integrated framework designed to enable consistent cross-script phonetic alignment and text normalization. At its heart is an architecture built for interoperability, combining a unified phonological feature space rooted in linguistic principles with modular, language-specific adapters. This structure allows for robust mapping and comparison between any pair of scripts.