An automatic phonetic aligner for brazilian portuguese with a praat interface

Abstract

The analysis of the phonetic entities of speech nearly always requires the alignment of an audio file with its phonetic transcription. However, it is an extremely labor-intensive task. An automatic alignment tool has modules that depend on the language and, while there are many public resources for some languages (e.g., English and French), the resources for Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are still limited. This work describes the development of an automatic phonetic alignment tool for BP, consisting of grapheme-to-phone converter, syllabification system and HTK-based acoustic models. This aligner is implemented and freely distributed as a plug-in of Praat. Performance tests are presented, comparing the current proposal with an existing tool.