INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

EasyAlign: An Automatic Phonetic Alignment Tool Under Praat

Jean-Philippe Goldman

University of Geneva, Switzerland

We provide a user-friendly automatic phonetic alignment tool for continuous speech, named EasyAlign. It is developed as a plug-in of Praat, the popular speech analysis software, and it is freely available. Its main advantage is that one can easily align speech from an orthographic transcription. It requires a few minor manual steps and the result is a multi-level annotation within a TextGrid composed of phonetic, syllabic, lexical and utterance tiers. Evaluation showed that the performances of this HTK-based aligner compare to human alignment and to other existing alignment tools. It was originally fully available for French, English. Community's interests for its extension to other languages helped to develop a straightforward methodology to add languages. While Spanish and Taiwan Min were recently added, other languages are under development.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Goldman, Jean-Philippe (2011): "Easyalign: an automatic phonetic alignment tool under praat", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 3233-3236.