Developing Resources for Automated Speech Processing of Quebec French

Abstract

The analysis of the structure of speech nearly always rests on the alignment of the speech recording with a phonetic transcription. Nowadays several tools can perform this speech segmentation automatically. However, none of them allows the automatic segmentation of Quebec French (QF hereafter), the acoustics and phonotactics of QF differing widely from that of France French (FF hereafter). To adequately segment QF, features like diphthongization of long vowels and affrication of coronal stops have to be taken into account. Thus acoustic models for automatic segmentation must be trained on speech samples exhibiting those phenomena. Dictionaries and lexicons must also be adapted and integrate differences in lexical units and in the phonology of QF. This paper presents the development of linguistic resources to be included into SPPAS software tool in order to get Text normalization, Phonetization, Alignment and Syllabification. We adapted the existing French lexicon and developed a QF-specific pronunciation dictionary. We then created an acoustic model from the existing ones and adapted it with 5 minutes of manually time-aligned data. These new resources are all freely distributed with SPPAS version 2.7; they perform the full process of speech segmentation in Quebec French.

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Reproductions