Representing various sounds in language, such as sound words, or onomatopoeias, is not only useful as an auxiliary means for automatic speech recognition, but also essential in emerging fields such as natural human-machine communication, searching audio archives for acoustic events, and abnormality detection based on sounds. This paper proposes a novel method for sound word generation from audio signals. The method is based on an end-to-end, sequence-to-sequence framework to solve the audio segmentation problem to find an appropriate segment of audio signals along time that corresponds to a sequence of phonemes, and the ambiguity problem, where multiple words may correspond to the same sound, depending on the situations or listeners. Our tests show that the method worked efficiently and achieved a 2.8 % mean phoneme error rate (MPER) and a 7.2 % word error rate (WER) in a sound word generation task.
