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Towards a Free, Forced Phonetic Aligner for Brazilian Portuguese Using Kaldi Tools

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Intelligent Systems (BRACIS 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12319))

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Abstract

Phonetic analysis of speech, in general, requires the alignment of audio samples to its phonetic transcription. This task could be performed manually for a couple of files, but as the corpus grows large it becomes unfeasibly time-consuming, which emphasizes the need for computational tools that perform such speech-phonemes forced alignment automatically. Therefore, due to the scarce availability of phonetic alignment tools for Brazilian Portuguese (BP), this work describes the evolution process towards creating a free phonetic alignment tool for BP using Kaldi, a toolkit that has been the state of the art for open-source speech recognition. Five acoustic models were trained with Kaldi and tested in phonetic alignment, where the evaluation took place in terms of the phone boundary metric. The results show that its performance is similar to some Kaldi-based aligners for other languages, and superior to an outdated phonetic aligner for BP based on HTK toolkit.

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Acknowledgment

We gratefully acknowledge NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of the Titan Xp GPU used for this research. The authors also would like to thank CAPES and CNPq research funding agencies, and Federal University of Pará (UFPA) under Edital n\(^\circ \) 06/2019 – PIBIC/PROPESP for the financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Exact and Natural Sciences, Federal University of Pará, Augusto Corrêa 1, Belém, 66075–110, Brazil

    Ana Larissa Dias, Cassio Batista, Daniel Santana & Nelson Neto

Authors
  1. Ana Larissa Dias
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  2. Cassio Batista
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  3. Daniel Santana
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  4. Nelson Neto
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ana Larissa Dias .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil

    Ricardo Cerri

  2. Federal University of ABC, Santo Andre, Brazil

    Ronaldo C. Prati

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Dias, A.L., Batista, C., Santana, D., Neto, N. (2020). Towards a Free, Forced Phonetic Aligner for Brazilian Portuguese Using Kaldi Tools. In: Cerri, R., Prati, R.C. (eds) Intelligent Systems. BRACIS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12319. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61377-8_44

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61377-8_44

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