Is there a way to generate words that sound similar to a given dictionary word without using a corpus?

Question

I am trying to use phonetic algorithms like Soundex and/or Metaphone to generate words that sound similar to a given dictionary word. Do I have to have a corpus of all dictionary words for doing that? Is there another way to generate words that sound similar to a given word without using a corpus? I am trying to do it in Python.

Answer 1

If you don't use a corpus, then you will probably have to manually define a set of rules to split a word in phonetic parts and then find the list of close phonemes. This can generate similar sounding words but most won't exist. If you want to generate close sounding words that exist, then you necessarily need a corpus.

You didn't precise the goal of your task, but you may be interested in the works of Will Leben "Sounder I" (and II and III) and Jabberwocky sentences.