MUST&P-SRL: Multi-lingual and Unified Syllabification in Text and Phonetic Domains for Speech Representation Learning
This provides a tool for researchers in speech processing to extract syllabic features across languages, though it is incremental as it builds on existing forced-alignment tools and resources.
The paper tackles the problem of automatic syllabification in multiple languages by developing a unified method that works in both textual and phonetic domains, demonstrating its efficacy through an ablation study on English, French, and Spanish. It applies this technique to the CMU ARCTIC dataset to generate annotations useful for speech representation learning and related fields.
In this paper, we present a methodology for linguistic feature extraction, focusing particularly on automatically syllabifying words in multiple languages, with a design to be compatible with a forced-alignment tool, the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA). In both the textual and phonetic domains, our method focuses on the extraction of phonetic transcriptions from text, stress marks, and a unified automatic syllabification (in text and phonetic domains). The system was built with open-source components and resources. Through an ablation study, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in automatically syllabifying words from several languages (English, French and Spanish). Additionally, we apply the technique to the transcriptions of the CMU ARCTIC dataset, generating valuable annotations available online\footnote{\url{https://github.com/noetits/MUST_P-SRL}} that are ideal for speech representation learning, speech unit discovery, and disentanglement of speech factors in several speech-related fields.