auto alignment of transcript and audio?

[Claire Bowern]

I've been using the Penn forced alignment tool (
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/) for aligning individual words. This is
for English, but it would be adaptable to other languages assuming there was
data on phonetic structures. (I actually have this for Bardi but haven't had
the time to try to implement the program for Bardi yet.)

It's free, and at least for the English stuff I've been doing, has been
producing very good results.

Claire

On Apr 9, 2011 5:24 AM, "Doug Cooper" <doug.cooper.thailand at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi, Nick:
> We made extensive use of Lipsync (working with Russian). Performance
> was extremely good on reasonably clean input, and fell off on very noisy
> recordings, musical interludes, and (of course) inaccurate transcription.
> http://www.annosoft.com/lipsync-tool
> The desktop tool is US$500 (that's about $79.99 Aussie); there's also an
> SDK. I think they have save-disabled and 30-day trial versions available
> for demo. Their xml input and output formats were easy to modify.
>
> I had some correspondence with the brains behind the operation; he was
> friendly and quick to respond. I've attached part of one note, below.
>
> A fundamental issue with audio alignment is that it is not robust in the
> way that, say, even bad OCR is. Once sync is lost, it's difficult to
recover
> automatically. The workaround is to embed breakpoints -- not terribly
> difficult, but it does require a human sitting at a computer for long
hours.
>
> Good luck,
> Doug
>
> Mark Zartler <mzartler at annosoft.com> wrote:
> > I've tried a couple of times to implement a speech/music/noise
discriminator,
> > but have a come up with lackluster results. It's a high value feature
for us,
> > but it has been an elusive thing.
> [snip]
>> We have a few processes to develop new languages. If we have access to a
> > pronunciation dictionary, we can crunch a letter to sound system, using
> > methods by Dr Alan Black in his paper (Issues building General Letter To
> > Sound Rules).
> [snip]
> > I'd be happy to do some research into your needed languages to get a
feel
> > for the difficulties in each of them. I enjoy this work.
>
>
>
>
> On 4/9/2011 2:33 PM, Nick Thieberger wrote:
>> Has anyone had experience of software that takes a textual transcript
>> and aligns it with the media it transcribes? I know it exists for
>> major languages but have not seen it working and do not know of the
>> software. It would be interesting to know how applicable it could be
>> to the many hours of (handwritten/typed) transcripts of recordings we
>> have in the PARADISEC collection.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Nick
>>
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