The SPPAS participation to the forced-alignment task of Evalita 2011

Abstract

SPPAS is a new tool to produce automatic annotations which include utterance, word, syllabic and phonemic segmentations from a recorded speech sound and its transcription. SPPAS is "userfriendly" and open source software issued under the GNU Public License. This paper describes SPPAS algorithms and Italian resources for phonetization and alignment and evaluations related to the "Forced Alignment on Spontaneous Speech" task of the Evalita 2011 campaign. SPPAS is based on a dictionary look-ups approach for the phonetization and the use of the grammar-based Julius engine for alignment. A grammar contains sets of predefined combinations of words and contains one or more representations of the distinct phones that make up each word. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.