Automatic phonetic transcription of large speech corpora: a comparative study

This study investigates whether automatic transcription procedures can approximate manual phonetic transcriptions typically delivered with contemporary large speech corpora. We used ten automatic procedures to generate a broad phonetic transcription of well-prepared speech (read-aloud texts) and spontaneous speech (telephone dialogues). The resulting transcriptions were compared to manually verified phonetic transcriptions. We found that the quality of this type of transcription can be approximated by a fairly simple and cost-effective procedure.