A dynamic alignment algorithm for imperfect speech and transcript

Abstract

This paper presents a novel alignment approach for imperfect speech and the corresponding transcription. The algorithm gets started with multi-stage sentence boundary detection in audio, followed by a dynamic programming based search, to find the optimal alignment and detect the mismatches at sentence level. Experiments show promising performance, compared to the traditional forced alignment approach. The proposed algorithm has already been applied in preparing multimedia content for an online English training platform.