Performance of forced-alignment algorithms on children’s speech
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aim. We compared the performance of five forced-alignment algorithms on a corpus of child speech.Method. The child speech sample included 42 children between 3 and 6 years of age. The corpus was force-aligned using the Montreal Forced Aligner with and without speaker adaptive training, triphone alignment from the Kaldi speech recognition engine, the Prosodylab Aligner, and the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner. The sample was also manually aligned to create gold-standard alignments. We evaluated alignment algorithms in terms of accuracy (whether the interval covers the midpoint of the manual alignment) and difference in phone-onset times between the automatic and manual intervals.Results. The Montreal Forced Aligner with speaker adaptive training showed the highest accuracy and smallest timing differences. Vowels were consistently the most accurately aligned class of sounds across all the aligners, and alignment accuracy increased with age for fricative sounds across the aligners too. Interpretation. The best-performing aligner fell just short of human-level reliability for forced alignment. Researchers can use forced alignment with child speech for certain classes of sounds (vowels, fricatives for older children), especially as part of a semi-automated workflow where alignments are later inspected for gross errors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".