# BanglaIPA: Towards Robust Text-to-IPA Transcription with Contextual Rewriting in Bengali

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01778 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01778/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [UniMax: Fairer and more Effective Language Sampling for Large-Scale Multilingual Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09151/) (2023)
- [Make Your LLM Fully Utilize the Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16811/) (2024)
- [Not Low-Resource Anymore: Aligner Ensembling, Batch Filtering, and New Datasets for Bengali-English Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09359/) (2020)
- [Transformer based Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06338/) (2020)
- [Can Large Language Models Understand Context?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00858/) (2024)
- [Contextualized Rewriting for Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00385/) (2021)
- [Revisiting IPA-based Cross-lingual Text-to-speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07187/) (2021)
- [Grapheme-to-Phoneme Transformer Model for Transfer Learning Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04091/) (2021)
- [BanglaTalk: Towards Real-Time Speech Assistance for Bengali Regional Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06188/) (2025)
- [Transcribing Bengali Text with Regional Dialects to IPA using District Guided Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17407/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Many Dialects, Many Languages, One Cultural Lens: Evaluating Multilingual VLMs for Bengali Culture Understanding Across Historically Linked Languages and Regional Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21165/) (2026)
- [Register Shifts Break LLM Safety: A Bengali Benchmark with Culturally Grounded Harms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22335/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite its widespread use, Bengali lacks a robust automated International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription system that effectively supports both standard language and regional dialectal texts. Existing approaches struggle to handle regional variations, numerical expressions, and generalize poorly to previously unseen words. To address these limitations, we propose BanglaIPA, a novel IPA generation system that integrates a character-based vocabulary with word-level alignment. The proposed system accurately handles Bengali numerals and demonstrates strong performance across regional dialects. BanglaIPA improves inference efficiency by leveraging a precomputed word-to-IPA mapping dictionary for previously observed words. The system is evaluated on the standard Bengali and six regional variations of the DUAL-IPA dataset. Experimental results show that BanglaIPA outperforms baseline IPA transcription models by 58.4-78.7% and achieves an overall mean word error rate of 11.4%, highlighting its robustness in phonetic transcription generation for the Bengali language.