Abstract
Forced alignment has been at the core of speech recognition technology since the 1970s, and it was first used in phonetics research in the 1990s. Progress in digital multimedia, networking, and mass storage has created enormous and growing volumes of transcribed speech, which forced alignment can turn into vast phonetic databases. However, speech science has so far taken relatively little advantage of this opportunity, because it requires tools and methods that are now difficult for most speech researchers to access. Moreover, these tools have not been completely developed and tested for many applications. These technologies are leading the study of human speech into a revolutionary new era—a movement from the study of small, private, and mostly artificial datasets to the analysis of published collections of natural speech that are thousands or even millions of times larger. In this chapter, we will illustrate some of the ways that forced alignment can be used as a tool in speech science and discuss directions for improvement.
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Yuan, J., Lai, W., Cieri, C., Liberman, M. (2023). Using Forced Alignment for Phonetics Research. In: Huang, CR., Hsieh, SK., Jin, P. (eds) Chinese Language Resources. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 49. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38913-9_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38913-9_17
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