@inproceedings{passmore-etal-2025-english,
    title = "{E}nglish-based acoustic models perform well in the forced alignment of two {E}nglish-based Pacific Creoles",
    author = "Passmore, Sam  and
      Roque, Lila San  and
      Gillespie, Kirsty  and
      Nath, Saurabh  and
      Davey, Kira  and
      Mullan, Keira  and
      Cawley, Tim  and
      Biggs, Jennifer  and
      Billington, Rosey  and
      Evans, Bethwyn  and
      Thieberger, Nick  and
      Barth, Danielle",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1505/",
    pages = "31172--31183",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    abstract = "Expanding the breadth languages used to study sociophonetic variation and change is an important step in the theoretical development of sociophonetics. As data archives grow, forced alignment can accelerate the study of sociophonetic variation in minority languages. This paper examines the application of English and custom-made acoustic models on the alignment of vowels in two Pacific Creoles, Tok Pisin (59 hours) and Bislama (38.5 hours). We find that English models perform acceptably well in both languages, and as well as humans in vowel environments described as `Highly Reliable'. Custom models performed better in Bislama than Tok Pisin. We end the paper with recommendations on the use of cross-linguistic acoustic models in the case of English-Based Creoles."
}