CoALT: A Software for Comparing Automatic Labelling Tools

Speech-text alignment tools are frequently used in speech technology and research. In this paper, we propose a GPL software CoALT (Comparing Automatic Labelling Tools) for comparing two automatic labellers or two speech-text alignment tools, ranking them and displaying statistics about their differences. The main feature of CoALT is that a user can define its own criteria for evaluating and comparing the speech-text alignment tools since the required quality for labelling depends on the targeted application. Beyond ranking, our tool provides useful statistics for each labeller and above all about their differences and can emphasize the drawbacks and advantages of each labeller. We have applied our software for the French and English languages but it can be used for another language by simply defining the list of the phonetic symbols and optionally a set of phonetic rules. In this paper we present the usage of the software for comparing two automatic labellers on the corpus TIMIT. Moreover, as automatic labelling tools are configurable (number of GMMs, phonetic lexicon, acoustic parameterisation), we then present how CoALT allows to determine the best parameters for our automatic labelling tool.