Dr Simón González and Dr James Grama Workshop

Date: 12 September 2018, 10:00am – 1:00pm 
Venue: Australian Hearing Hub, Level 3, Room 3.610
Presenters: Dr Simón González and Dr James Grama, Australian National University
Host: Associate Professor Felicity Cox
Topic: Keeping up to date with forced alignment: the Montreal Forced Aligner

Overview
Advances in the technology around speech recognition have seen the development of new tools for forced alignment in linguistics. The Montreal Forced Aligner, or MFA (McAuliffe et al. 2017), is a new aligner that outperforms most other aligners widely in use in linguistics today. Its superior performance is partly attributable to its use of the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit, as well as its ability to train on the data input to it. 

In this 3-hour hands-on workshop, we will provide instruction on the use of MFA. Focusing on its application to English data, we will outline best practices for data preparation and wrangling, and for managing output from the forced-alignment. Workshop participants will have the opportunity to prepare and align their own data, and will receive input on how to enhance performance for their data specifically.

McAuliffe, M., Socolof, M., Mihuc, S., Wagner, M., & Sonderegger, M. 2017. Montreal Forced Aligner: Trainable text-speech alignment using Kaldi. Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the International Speech Communication Association.

Registration 
Registration for the workshop will be available here. Instructions on how to prepare your data will be distributed to participants in advance of the workshop.