Abstract
Language documentation projects supported by recent funding intiatives have created a large number of multimedia corpora of typologically diverse languages. Most of these corpora provide a manual alignment of transcription and audio data at the level of larger units, such as sentences or intonation units. Their usefulness both for corpus-linguistic and psycholinguistic research and for the development of tools and teaching materials could, however, be increased by achieving a more fine-grained alignment of transcription and audio at the word or even phoneme level. Since most language documentation corpora contain data on small languages, there usually do not exist any speech recognizers or acoustic models specifically trained on these languages. We therefore investigate the feasibility of untrained forced alignment for such corpora. We report on an evaluation of the tool (Web)MAUS (Kisler, 2012) on several language documentation corpora and discuss practical issues in the application of forced alignment. Our evaluation shows that (Web)MAUS with its existing acoustic models combined with simple grapheme-to-phoneme conversion can be successfully used for word-level forced alignment of a diverse set of languages without additional training, especially if a manual prealignment of larger annotation units is already avaible.- Anthology ID:
- L14-1123
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2014
- Address:
- Reykjavik, Iceland
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3940–3947
- Language:
- URL:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1176_Paper.pdf
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jan Strunk, Florian Schiel, and Frank Seifart. 2014. Untrained Forced Alignment of Transcriptions and Audio for Language Documentation Corpora using WebMAUS. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 3940–3947, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- Untrained Forced Alignment of Transcriptions and Audio for Language Documentation Corpora using WebMAUS (Strunk et al., LREC 2014)
- PDF:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1176_Paper.pdf