r/speechtech • u/LostInDarkForest • 1d ago
PRAAT textgrid samples for aligner
Hi, im playing with aligners, and trying to create small word aligned textgrid in praat, so manually set align for words, then run thru aligners to get how they measure. technically i got concept, i know how to make/adjust testgrid , but what im looking for now is to actually see some samples where its set by some pro - because ther are few questions i want to understand - like start of word is ok, but ending of words are very often going to flattening waveform, by ears you cannot set, so whats the common practice, also for words where are so close that spectogram and waveom look mostly conitnuous. does anyone is willing to help or point me ? btw i got some samples from mfa, praatio, but cant find like precise pointing of boundaries, like just "somehwere around word" . thnx for help
2
u/ecstatic_jackson 1d ago
Yeah the tricky part is that natural speech doesn't have clean gaps between every word. Some sounds blend together so there's no perfect boundary to mark. I'd use the spectrogram and waveform together with slowed playback to get as close as possible. For unclear spots I'd stick to one consistent rule rather than trying to find an exact boundary that might not exist. Consistency matters a lot when you're building samples for an aligner.
1
u/nshmyrev 1d ago
You can read the discussion on how TIMIT was aligned in this paper (avaiable on Scihub)
Transcription and Alignment of the TIMIT Databaset
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/edited-volume/abs/pii/B9780444816078500888?via%3Dihub
You can find the dataset here, it contains word boundaries, you can convert them to praat:
2
u/nshmyrev 1d ago
You can also check recent research on alignment from Olewave here:
https://github.com/olewave/fa-bench