Abstract
EasyAlign is a user-friendly automatic phonetic alignment tool for continuous speech. It is developed as a plug-in of Praat, and it is freely available. Its main advantage is that one can easily align speech from an orthographic transcription. It requires a few minor manual steps and the result is a multi-level annotation within a TextGrid composed of phonetic, syllabic, lexical and utterance tiers. Evaluation of EasyAlign was performed according to three approaches: a boundary-based, a duration-based and segment-based approach. Results are very promising, showing, on the one hand, little difference between EasyAlign and human alignment, and a good generalization of the training, on the other one. EasyAlign is fully available for French and Spanish, while other languages such as English, Taiwan Min are under development thanks to a growing interest of community users.
Goldman, Jean-Philippe