Long speech-text alignment can facilitate large-scale study of rich spoken language resources that have recently become widely accessible, e.g., collections of audio books, or multimedia documents. For such resources, the conventional Viterbi based forced alignment may often be proven inadequate mainly due to mismatched audio and text and/or noisy audio.

We have developed SailAlign which is an open-source software toolkit for robust long speech-text alignment that circumvents these restrictions. It implements an adaptive, iterative speech recognition and text alignment scheme that allows for the processing of very long (and possibly noisy) audio and is robust to transcription errors. More…