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Experiments on Kaldi-Based Forced Phonetic Alignment for Brazilian Portuguese

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Intelligent Systems (BRACIS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13074))

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Abstract

Forced phonetic alignment (FPA) is the task of associating a given phonetic unit to a timestamp interval in the speech waveform. Phoneticians are able mark the boundaries with precision, but as the corpus grows it becomes infeasible to do it by hand. For Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in particular, only three tools appear to perform FPA: EasyAlign, Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA), and UFPAlign. Therefore, this work aims to develop resources based on Kaldi toolkit for UFPAlign, including their release alongside all scripts under open licenses; and to bring forth a comparison to the other two aforementioned aligners. Evaluation took place in terms of the phone boundary metric over a dataset of 385 hand-aligned utterances, and results show that Kaldi-based aligners perform better overall, and that UFPAlign models are more accurate than MFA’s. Furthermore, complex deep-learning-based approaches did not seem to improve performance compared to simpler models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/falabrasil.

  2. 2.

    http://www.kaldi-asr.org/doc/dnn.html.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/falabrasil.

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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 for providing scholarships and FAPESPA (grant 001/2020, process 2019/583359) for the financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Graduate Program, FalaBrasil Group, Federal University of Pará, Augusto Corrêa 1, Belém, 66075–110, Brazil

    Cassio Batista & Nelson Neto

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  1. Cassio Batista
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  2. Nelson Neto
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Correspondence to Cassio Batista .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal de Sergipe, São Cristóvão, Brazil

    André Britto

  2. Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Karina Valdivia Delgado

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Batista, C., Neto, N. (2021). Experiments on Kaldi-Based Forced Phonetic Alignment for Brazilian Portuguese. In: Britto, A., Valdivia Delgado, K. (eds) Intelligent Systems. BRACIS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13074. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91699-2_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91699-2_32

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