Automatic alignment of audiobooks in Afrikaans

Abstract

This paper reports on the automatic alignment of audiobooks in Afrikaans. An existing Afrikaans pronunciation dictionary and corpus of Afrikaans speech data are used to generate baseline acoustic models. The baseline system achieves an average duration independent overlap rate of 0.977 on the first three chapters of an audio version of “Ruiter in die Nag”, an Afrikaans book by Mikro. The average duration independent overlap rate increases to 0.990 when the speech data from the audiobook is used to perform Maximum A Posteriori adaptation on the baseline models. The corresponding value for models trained on the audiobook data is 0.996. An automatic measure of alignment accuracy is also introduced and compared to accuracies measured relative to a gold standard.