Prak: An automatic phonetic alignment tool for Czech
This tool simplifies phonetic research for Czech linguists and students by improving data preparation efficiency and usability across multiple platforms, though it is incremental compared to existing alignment tools.
The researchers tackled the labor-intensive task of phonetic alignment for Czech speech by creating an open-source tool that generates phone sequences from text and aligns them with audio, achieving mostly correct pronunciation variant choice including glottal stop detection and capturing most Czech assimilation logic.
Labeling speech down to the identity and time boundaries of phones is a labor-intensive part of phonetic research. To simplify this work, we created a free open-source tool generating phone sequences from Czech text and time-aligning them with audio. Low architecture complexity makes the design approachable for students of phonetics. Acoustic model ReLU NN with 56k weights was trained using PyTorch on small CommonVoice data. Alignment and variant selection decoder is implemented in Python with matrix library. A Czech pronunciation generator is composed of simple rule-based blocks capturing the logic of the language where possible, allowing modification of transcription approach details. Compared to tools used until now, data preparation efficiency improved, the tool is usable on Mac, Linux and Windows in Praat GUI or command line, achieves mostly correct pronunciation variant choice including glottal stop detection, algorithmically captures most of Czech assimilation logic and is both didactic and practical.