Title: Using Forced Alignment for Phonetics Research Authors: Jiahong Yuan, Wei Lai, Chris Cieri, Mark Libermangs Published: 19th December 2023 Link: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ForcedAlignment_Final_edited.pdf
Abstract
Forced alignment has been at the core of speech recognition technology since the 1970s, and was first used in phonetics research in the 1990s. Progress in digital multimedia, networking and mass storage is creating enormous and growing volumes of transcribed speech, which forced alignment can turn into vast phonetic databases. However, speech science has so far taken relatively little advantage of this opportunity, because it requires tools and methods that are now difficult for most speech researchers to access, and are incompletely developed and tested for many applications. But these technologies are leading the study of human speech into a revolutionary new era: a movement from the study of small, private, and mostly artificial datasets to the analysis of published collections of natural speech that are thousands or even millions of times larger. In this chapter, we illustrate some of the ways that forced alignment can be used as a tool in speech science, and discuss directions for improvement.