Automatic post-synchronization of speech utterances

The paper considers a prototype for automatic postsynchronization that consists of two basic components. As a first step, dynamic time warping is applied to compute the time-correspondence between an original utterance and an utterance that serves as the timing reference signal. In a second step, a time-scaling algorithm modifies the time structure of the original utterance accordingly. Informal diagnostic evaluation has shown that good results are obtained if the similarity between the acoustic-phonetic contents of the utterances is high. Possible ways for improving robustness against acoustic-phonetic differences, such as those that result from different coarticulation, are suggested.