The Pitman Shorthand Language (PSL) is a recording medium practiced in all organizations, where English is the medium of transaction. It has the practical advantage of high speed of recording, more than 180 words per minute, because of which it is appreciably received all over. This recording medium has its continued existence in spite of considerable developments in speech processing systems, which are not universally established yet. In order to exploit vast transcribing potential of PSL a new area of research on automation of PSL processing, is conceived.
This paper describes the substitution of equivalent English words for the phonetic compositions of the transcribed words, in the process of automatic generation of English text from PSL document. The transcription is achieved by making use of two new types of dictionaries specifically developed and implemented for this purpose, one of them being a phonetic dictionary wherein the words are sequenced in phonetic order and the other being an extended conventional dictionary wherein the words are appended with additional details such as domain of their use, forms of verbs and so on. The proposed approach is tested with limited words in both the types dictionaries and is found to perform satisfactorily. However, the scope exists for addition of new words into these dictionaries.