Forced Alignment of the Phonologie du Frangais Contemporain Corpus

摘要

The Phonologie du Frangais Contemporain project is an international, collaborative research effort to create resources for the study of contemporary French phonology. It has produced a large, partially transcribed and annotated corpus of spoken French, consisting of approximately 300 h of recordings, and covering 48 geographical regions (including Metropolitan France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and French-speaking countries of Africa). Following a detailed protocol, speakers read aloud a word list and a short text and engage in guided and spontaneous conversation with an interviewer. The corpus presents several challenges: significant regional accent variation; variable recording quality and different types of environment noise; variation in speaker characteristics (age, sex); and interspersed segments of overlapping speech. In this article, we describe the procedure followed to address these challenges and produce an automatic forced alignment of the corpus at the phone, syllable and token level, starting from the initial transcriptions.