3. Friday, January 12, 2024: "Using a forced aligner for prosody research"

Forced alignment is a speech technique that can automatically align audio files with transcripts. With the help of forced alignment tools, annotating audio files and creating annotated speech databases have become much more accessible and efficient. Researchers have recently started to evaluate the benefits and accuracy of forced aligners in speech research and have provided insightful suggestions for improvement. However, previous work has so far paid little attention to evaluating forced aligners in prosody research, which focuses on suprasegmental features. In this talk, I will present recent work on how to use a forced aligner to generate both the syllable level and phrase level for prosody research for a tonal language, which makes the audio data annotation at least 20 times faster than previously reported manual annotation efficiency.