TaylorWJones/CORAAL-Aligner

Two forced aligners trained on African American Language. # CORAAL-Aligner Existing forced alignment performs notoriously poorly on African American Langauge (AAL, alternately 'African American English', AAE), in part English forced aligners are generally not trained on AAL, and in part because pronunciations in the pronouncing dictionaries used to train such aligners are based on "standard" (e.g., white) English pronunciations. This repository contains two pretrained forced alignment models for use with the Montreal Forced Aligner, for speech in African American Language (AAL). Both models are trained on both the 1972 CORAAL (Washington) DC A and the 2016 CORAAL (Washington) DC B interviews. **The first model, CORAAL1.zip**, is trained using the standard CMU Dictionary and phoneset. It performs quite well at finding correct word-level boundaries, however it has shortcomings with regards to AAL. Specifically, because it is looking for 'standard' pronunciations, it "finds" segments that may (1) not actually be present (e.g., "finding" an /r/ that was either vocalized or deleted), or (2) may be different in AAL (e.g., th-fronting that yields F AA1 V AH0 for "FATHER"). **The second model, CORAAL2.zip**, is trained using a novel phoneset that includes nasalized vowels (e.g., in addition to strings like 'IH1 N', there is also 'IH~'), and includes AAL specific pronunciations. The model takes into account AAL phonology, and so has novel pronunciations *in addition* to the CMU Dictionary pronunciations. Phonological processes accounted for in the CORAAL2.zip model are: - postvocalic r vocalization/deletion - postvocalic l vocalization/deletion - TH stopping - TH fronting - post- and intervocalic v deletion - vowel nasalization - word/syllable final obstruent deletion/debuccalization - word final S/Z deletion - T/D deletion (and debuccalization) For example, in addition to the CMU Dictionary pronunciation of "northeast": NORTHEAST N AO2 R TH IY1 S T ...there is also: NORTHEAST N AO2 TH IY1 S T NORTHEAST N AO2 F IY1 S T N …