SPPAS - the automatic annotation and analysis of speech

SPPAS in a nutshell (PDF) — SPPAS 4.2 in a nutshell (PDF)

A scientific research software

SPPAS offers open source cross-platform, customizable automatic annotation and analysis solutions for audio and video media.

There is simply no other tool for linguists to simple use in the automatic annotations of speech, the analyses of any kind of annotated data and the conversion of annotated files. You can imagine the annotations or analyses you need, SPPAS does the rest!

Brigitte Bigi is the author of SPPAS: she's a computer scientist, researcher at Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France.

The French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation presented the first Open Science Awards for Open Source Research Software - during OSEC 2022:

Honourable Mention to the Special Jury Prize - Open Science Awards for Open Source Research Software - 2022 — **Honourable Mention to the Special Jury Prize**

Annotate

SPPAS produces automatically annotations from a recorded audio and its orthographic transcription and/or from a video.

Analyze

SPPAS helps for the analysis of annotated files: statistics, requests, view and edit files.

Convert

SPPAS converts annotated files from/to a wide range of formats: xra, TextGrid, eaf, trs...

Hot topics

Hot topic 2022-2023: Support of Bengali language

Thanks to a collaboration with Moumita Pakrashi (Research Scholar at Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati Kolkata, West Bengal, India), I'm very pleased to announce that SPPAS is able to perform Text Normalization, Phonetization and Forced-Alignment for Bengali language. Method and results will be published at the Language and Technology Conference (21-23 April 2023). Next step is to perform automatic syllabification...

Hot topic 2023: Edit

Annotate manually with the "Edit" page of the GUI:

SPPAS Edit Screenshot — SPPAS 4.2: The Edit page with an audio file, a video file, the manual orthographic transcription and 2 automatic annotations.

Hot topic 2023-2025: Cued Speech Automatic Generation

Cued speech keys generator was introduced the first time in version 3.9, August 2021.

A proof of concept of an augmented reality system was firstly proposed in version 4.2, January 2022.

The proof-of-concept will be turned into a stable version in 2023, then some models based on the analyses of CLeLfPC will be implemented (statistical distributions analyses, machine learning, ...).

Result of the proof-of-concept of "Cued Speech automatic annotation" (SPPAS 4.3).

Why should you trust SPPAS?

Because...

The SPPAS software tool is reliable: the application performs the features that the documentation described. It can tolerate the user making mistakes or using the software in unexpected ways: in that cases an error identifier with an error message is displayed. Its performances are good enough for the required uses cases, under the expected load and data volume.
SPPAS is installed on your computer: your corpus won't be transferred on the web. No statistics, no personal data are collected.
Its ongoing maintenance by the author: fixing bugs, keeping its systems operational, investigating failures, checking it on 3 platforms, modifying it for new use cases, adding new features and last but not least adding new language resources, updating the documentation and the website.
SPPAS is an open source package. You can edit the source code of the software tool, you can modify it, you can re-distribute it, etc.

How to cite?

Brigitte Bigi (2015). SPPAS - Multi-lingual Approaches to the Automatic Annotation of Speech . In "the Phonetician" - International Society of Phonetic Sciences, ISSN 0741-6164, Number 111-112 / 2015-I-II, pages 54-69.
Brigitte Bigi (2016). A phonetization approach for the forced-alignment task in SPPAS. In Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LNAI 9561, pp. 515-526.

Key Facts and Figures

Documentations:
- The SPPAS documentation: 160 pages
- The resources documentation: 60 pages
- The XRA file format: 15 pages
- The transcription convention: 5 pages
References: 29
- 4 about the software tool itself
- 18 about the annotations
- 3 about the linguistic resources construction
- 2 about the analyses
- 2 about the data representation
Cited 440+, including
- cited by 125 references: SPPAS - Multi-lingual Approaches to the automatic Annotation of Speech
- cited by 109 references: SPPAS: a tool for the phonetic segmentations of Speech
- cited by 108 references: SPeech Phonetization Alignment and Syllabification (SPPAS): a tool for the automatic analysis...

Supports

During 2023-2025 SPPAS will partly be supported by Firah (Applied Disability Research).

SPPAS is supported by the LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage - Aix-en-Provence (France), an Aix-Marseille University and C.N.R.S. research laboratory.

SPPAS was partly supported by the following projects:

ORTOLANG - Investissement d'Avenir
CoFee - Conversational Feedback
Variamu - Variations in Action: a MUltilingual approach
Campus France - Procore PHC
NaijaSynCor
Vapvisio