On the Automatic Validation of Speech Alignment

The alignment of two utterances is the basis of many speech processing applications. The acoustic user interface of such applications should be capable of detecting insufficient alignment results and identifying the responsible input utterances. In this paper, we discuss the automatic validation of speech alignment and propose two new validation algorithms. The first method relies on locating and matching the syllable nuclei of the aligned utterances. The second method performs syllable-level comparison of the speech signal envelopes in accordance to the alignment time-warping path. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms perform consistently well and can be effectively applied for the validation of different speech alignment methods.