Automatic Phonetic Transcription: An Overview

Both in linguistics and in speech technology phonetic transcriptions (PTs) are often needed. Given the many drawbacks in making manual PTs, researchers have been looking for ways to obtain PTs automatically. In this paper an overview is presented of automatic phonetic transcription (APT). Several aspects of APT are discussed: evaluation, generation and usability. Evaluation is needed to determine the quality of APTs. Usually this is done by comparing the APTs with human reference transcriptions. Generating APTs can be done in several ways, e.g. by means of phone recognition or forced recognition. The quality of the generated APTs can be enhanced by optimizing the automatic speech recognition systems used to make the APTs. In spite of the current limitations of ASR technology, APTs already offer some important advantages for phonetic research. In this paper we explain how.