Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

An Automatic Phonetic Aligner for Brazilian Portuguese with a Praat Interface

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (PROPOR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9727))

Abstract

The analysis of the phonetic entities of speech nearly always requires the alignment of an audio file with its phonetic transcription. However, it is an extremely labor-intensive task. An automatic alignment tool has modules that depend on the language and, while there are many public resources for some languages (e.g., English and French), the resources for Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are still limited. This work describes the development of an automatic phonetic alignment tool for BP, consisting of grapheme-to-phone converter, syllabification system and HTK-based acoustic models. This aligner is implemented and freely distributed as a plug-in of Praat. Performance tests are presented, comparing the current proposal with an existing tool.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Brognaux, S., Roekhaut, S., Drugman, T., Beaufort, R.: Automatic phone alignment. In: Isahara, H., Kanzaki, K. (eds.) JapTAL 2012. LNCS, vol. 7614, pp. 300–311. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Schiel, F., Draxler, C.: The production of speech corpora. Technical report, Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Figueira, L., Oliveira, L.C.: Comparison of phonetic segmentation tools for european Portuguese. In: Teixeira, A., de Lima, V.L.S., de Oliveira, L.C., Quaresma, P. (eds.) PROPOR 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5190, pp. 252–255. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Kominek, J., Bennett, C., Black, A.W.: Evaluating and correcting phoneme segmentation for unit selection synthesis. In: Proceedings of Eurospeech, pp. 313–316 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Paulo, S., de Oliveira, L.C.: Automatic phonetic alignment and its confidence measures. In: Vicedo, J.L., Martínez-Barco, P., Muńoz, R., Saiz Noeda, M. (eds.) EsTAL 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3230, pp. 36–44. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Goldman, J.P.: Easyalign: an automatic phonetic alignment tool under Praat. In: Proceedings of Interspeech, pp. 3233–3236 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bigi, B., Hirst, D.: Speech phonetization alignment and syllabification (SPPAS): a tool for the automatic analysis of speech prosody. In: Proceedings of Speech Prosody, pp. 1–4 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Yuan, J., Liberman, M.: Speaker identification on the SCOTUS corpus. In: Proceedings of Acoustics, pp. 5687–5690 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Brognaux, S., Roekhaut, S., Drugman, T., Beaufort, R.: Train & Align: a new online tool for automatic phonetic alignment. In: IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, pp. 416–421 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Young, S., Ollason, D., Valtchev, V., Woodland, P.: The HTK Book. Cambridge University Engineering Department, version 3.4 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner (P2FA): University of Pennsylvania. phon.chass.ncsu.edu/cgi-bin/step7.cgi

  12. Boersma, P., Weenink, D.: Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 6.0.06) [computer program] (2015). http://www.praat.org

  13. Goldman, J.P., Miranda, M.A., Stein, C.C., Auchlin, A.: EasyAlign for Brazilian Portuguese: a (semi) automatic segmental tool under Praat. In: Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference: Speech and Corpora, pp. 116–120 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Lee, A.: The Julius Book, Edition 1.0.3 - rev.4.1.5 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  15. FalaBrasil Project: Federal University of Pará. laps.ufpa.br/falabrasil/

  16. Bigi, B.: The SPPAS participation to Evalita 2011. In: Workshop on Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian, pp. 1–6 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Silva, D., de Lima, A., Maia, R., Braga, D., de Moraes, J.F., de Moraes, J.A., Resende Jr., F.: A rule-based grapheme-phone converter and stress determination for Brazilian Portuguese natural language processing. In: VI International Telecommunications Symposium, pp. 550–554 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Neto, N., Patrick, C., Klautau, A., Trancoso, I.: Free tools and resources for Brazilian Portuguese speech recognition. J. Braz. Comput. Soc. 17, 53–68 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. SAMPA: Computer Readable Phonetic Alphabet. phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/

  20. Davis, S., Merlmestein, P.: Comparison of parametric representations for monosyllabic word recognition in continuously spoken sentences. IEEE Trans. ASSP. 28, 357–366 (1980)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Woodland, P., Odell, J.J., Valtchev, V., Young, S.: Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition using HTK. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust. Speech Signal Process. 2, 125–128 (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Welch, L.R.: Hidden Markov models and the Baum-Welch algorithm. IEEE Inf. Theory Soc. Newsl. 53, 10–12 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Silva, D., Braga, D., Resende Jr., F.: Separação das sílabas e determinação da tonicidade no Português Brasileiro. In: XXVI Simpósio Brasileiro de Telecomunicações, pp. 1–5 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Monte, A., Ribeiro, D., Neto, N., Cruz, R., Klautau, A.: A rule-based syllabification algorithm with stress determination for Brazilian Portuguese natural language processing. In: 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 1418–1421 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Dicionário Online de Português, 7Graus, Portugal. www.dicio.com.br

  26. Neto, N., Rocha, W., Souza, G.: An open-source rule-based syllabification tool for Brazilian Portuguese. J. Braz. Comput. Soc. 21, 1–10 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Exact and Natural Sciences, Federal University of Pará, Augusto Correa. 1, Belém, PA, 660750110, Brazil

    Gleidson Souza & Nelson Neto

Authors
  1. Gleidson Souza
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Nelson Neto
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nelson Neto .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade de Lisbon, Portugal

    João Silva

  2. ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ricardo Ribeiro

  3. Universidade de Évora, Évora, Portugal

    Paulo Quaresma

  4. Universidade de Caxias do Sul, Caxias do Suö, Brazil

    André Adami

  5. Universidade de Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

    António Branco

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Souza, G., Neto, N. (2016). An Automatic Phonetic Aligner for Brazilian Portuguese with a Praat Interface. In: Silva, J., Ribeiro, R., Quaresma, P., Adami, A., Branco, A. (eds) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9727. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41552-9_38

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41552-9_38

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-41551-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-41552-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation