Corpus Phonetics Tutorial

TL;DR

This tutorial introduces speech scientists and engineers to automatic speech processing tools for corpus phonetics, covering various software for alignment and acoustic modeling to facilitate large-scale speech data analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview and practical guidance on multiple speech processing tools, enhancing accessibility for researchers in corpus phonetics.

Findings

Demonstrates how to use Kaldi for acoustic modeling and forced alignment.

Provides step-by-step instructions for using FAVE-align, Montreal Forced Aligner, and Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner.

Shows application of AutoVOT for stop consonant burst alignment.

Abstract

Corpus phonetics has become an increasingly popular method of research in linguistic analysis. With advances in speech technology and computational power, large scale processing of speech data has become a viable technique. This tutorial introduces the speech scientist and engineer to various automatic speech processing tools. These include acoustic model creation and forced alignment using the Kaldi Automatic Speech Recognition Toolkit (Povey et al., 2011), forced alignment using FAVE-align (Rosenfelder et al., 2014), the Montreal Forced Aligner (McAuliffe et al., 2017), and the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner (Yuan & Liberman, 2008), as well as stop consonant burst alignment using AutoVOT (Keshet et al., 2014). The tutorial provides a general overview of each program, step-by-step instructions for running the program, as well as several tips and tricks.