1. Introduction
What is SPPAS?
Overview
SPPAS - the automatic annotation and analyses of speech is a scientific computer software package. SPPAS is daily developed with the aim to provide a robust and reliable software. Available for free, with open source code, there is simply no other package for linguists to simple use in both the automatic annotations of speech, the analyses of any kind of annotated data and the conversion of annotated file formats. You can imagine the annotations or analyses you need, SPPAS does the rest!
SPPAS ensures flexibility rather than a one-size-fits all approach in the implementation of the proposed features. There are no fixed or unique solutions, but a bunch of customizable features to make choices according to the user requirements.
Annotating recordings is very labor-intensive and cost-ineffective
since it has to be performed manually by experienced researchers with
many hours of work. As the primary functionality, SPPAS proposes a set
of automatic or semi-automatic annotations of
recordings. In the present context, annotations are defined
as the practice of adding interpretative, linguistic information to an
electronic corpus of spoken and/or written language data.
(Leech, 1997). SPPAS automatizes the annotation processes and allows
users to save time. In order to be used efficiently, SPPAS expects a
rigorous methodology to collect data and to prepare them.Annotation
can also refer to the end-product of this process
Linguistics annotation, especially when dealing with multiple
domains, makes use of different tools within a given project. This
implies a rigorous annotation framework to ensure compatibilities
between annotations and time-saving. SPPAS annotation files are in a
specific XML format with extension xra
. Annotations
can be imported from and exported to a variety of other formats
including Praat (TextGrid, PitchTier, IntensityTier), Elan (eaf),
Transcriber (trs), Annotation Pro (antx), Phonedit (mrk), Sclite (ctm,
stm), HTK (lab, mlf), subtitles formats (srt, sub), CSV files…
[…] when multiple annotations are integrated into a single data
set, inter-relationships between the annotations can be explored both
qualitatively (by using database queries that combine levels) and
quantitatively (by running statistical analyses or machine learning
algorithms)
(Chiarcos 2008). As a consequence, the annotations must
be time-synchronized: annotations need to be time-aligned in order to be
useful for purposes such as analyses. Some special features are offered
in SPPAS for managing annotated files and analyzing
data. Among others, it includes a tool to filter multi-levels
annotations. Other included tools are to estimate descriptive
statistics, to manage annotated files, to manage audio files, etc. These
data analysis tools of SPPAS are mainly proposed in the Graphical User
Interface. However, advanced users can also access directly the
Application Programming Interface, for example to estimate statistics or
to manipulate annotated data.
User engagement
By using SPPAS, you agree to cite a reference in your publications. The full list of references is available in Chapter 7.
Need help
- Many problems can be solved by updating the version of SPPAS.
- When looking for more detail about some subject, one can search this documentation. This documentation is available in-line - see the SPPAS website, it is also included in the package in PDF format.
- There are: a F.A.Q., tutorials and slides in the SPPAS web site.
About the author
Since January 2011, Brigitte Bigi is the main author of SPPAS. She has a tenured position of researcher at the French CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. She’s working since 2009 at Laboratoire Parole et Langage in Aix-en-Provence, France.
More about the author:
Contact the author by e-mail:
- to improve the quality of the linguistic resources;
- to add new linguistic resources;
- to help in development;
- to add new annotations or analysis methods;
- to propose to collaborate for a research purpose;
- to declare an issue;
- to send a constructive comment.
Do not contact the author if:
- you failed to install Python or wxPython;
- you didn’t follow the tutorials;
- you didn’t read both the documentation and the tutorials.
Possible e-mails are:
- contact@sppas.org for general purposes;
- develop@sppas.org for developer questions or for a bug alert.
Contributors
Here is the list of other contributors in programming:
- April 2012-June 2012: Alexandre Ranson (1st website)
- April 2012-July 2012: Cazembé Henry (1st GUI)
- April 2012-June 2013: Bastien Herbaut (help system)
- March 2013-March 2014: Tatsuya Watanabe (annotated data support)
- April 2015-June 2015: Nicolas Chazeau (audio support)
- April 2015-June 2015: Jibril Saffi (annotated data support)
- April 2019-June 2019: Barthélémy Drabczuk (workspaces and num2letter)
- April 2020-June 2020: Laurent Vouriot (a SPEAKER annotation)
- April 2020-June 2020: Florian Hocquet (installer and video support)
- April 2023-June 2023: Mathias Cazals (dynamic web site)
- April 2023-June 2023: Florian Lopitaux (cued speech video tagger)
- April 2023-July 2023: Audric Vachet (GUI: video player of the page editor)
Licenses
SPPAS software, except documentation and resources, are distributed under the terms of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3.
Linguistic resources of SPPAS are either distributed:
- under the terms of the
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, v3
, or - on the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License
.
See the documentation of the resources for details about individual license.
To summarize, SPPAS users are:
- free to study the source code and the resources of the software they use,
- free to share the software and resources with other people,
- free to modify the software and resources.
Supports
All along the years, SPPAS was supported by the Laboratoire Parole et Langage in many ways.
2011-2012:
Partly supported by ANR OTIM project (Ref. Nr. ANR-08-BLAN-0239), Tools for Multimodal Information Processing. Read more at: http://www.lpl-aix.fr/~otim/
2013-2015:
Partly supported by ORTOLANG (Ref. Nr. ANR-11-EQPX-0032) funded by the « Investissements d’Avenir » French Government program managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR). Read more at: http://www.ortolang.fr/
2014-2016:
SPPAS was also partly carried out thanks to the support of the following projects or groups:
- CoFee - Conversational Feedback http://cofee.hypotheses.org
- Variamu - Variations in Action: a MUltilingual approach http://variamu.hypotheses.org
- Campus France, Procore PHC.
2017-2020:
The introduction of Naija language is supported by the ANR NaijaSynCor.
2019-2020:
The introduction of workspaces to manage files and the SPEAKER annotation type were both supported by the Vapvisio ANR project (ANR-18-CE28-0011-01).
2020:
Both the Proof of Concept of the Cued Speech automatic annotation and the package for the dependencies’ installation was supported by the LPL.
2023-2026:
Cued Speech Annotation is developed thanks to a grant of FIRAH - Applied Disability Research: https://www.firah.org/. See https://auto-cuedspeech.org for details.
Getting and installing
Websites
The website of SPPAS is located at the following URL: https://sppas.org
The releases and the source code are hosted by SourceForge at: http://sppas.sf.net/
Download and install SPPAS
The main website contains the Download
page to download
recent versions of the SPPAS software package and it describes the
installation instructions.
Download and decompress the SPPAS package:
There is a unique version of SPPAS which does not depend on the operating system. SPPAS is ready to run, so it does not need elaborate installation. All you need to do is to copy the SPPAS package from the website to somewhere on your computer. Choose a location with preferably only US-ASCII characters in the name - it obviously includes the path. The package of SPPAS is compressed and zipped, so you will need to decompress and unpack it once you’ve got it.
Install external programs
An installation guide is available and must be followed
carefully.
Notice that administrator rights can be required.
To summarize it:
- STEP 1: install the recommended version of Python 3.x ONCE (Windows/Linux)
- STEP 2:
- either GUI: launch the
setup.bat
(Windows) orsetup.command
(Linux, MacOS) to continue the installation and follows instructions; - or CLI: create a Python Virtual Environment with name
.sppaspyenv~
, then launch the programsppas\bin\preinstall.py
. It allows installing external programs to enable some features, and the linguistic resources.
- either GUI: launch the
In case of difficulty arising from this installation, you’re invited to consult the web first. It probably will provide the solution. If, however, the problems were to persist, ask a technician for help.
The package
SPPAS is a Research Software, distributed in the context of
the Open Science
. Then, unlike many other
software tool, SPPAS is not distributed as an executable program.
Instead, everything is done so that users can check / change
operations.
It is particularly suitable for automatic annotations: it allows anyone to customize automatic annotations to its own needs and to implement its custom annotation solution.
The SPPAS package is a directory with content as files and folders:
- the
README.txt
file, which aims to be read! - the files
setup.bat
andsetup.command
to install some external programs; - the files
sppas.bat
andsppas.command
to launch the Graphical User Interface; - the
samples
directory contains data of various languages: they are proposed in order to test various features of SPPAS; - the
demo
folder contains an audio file, its corresponding orthographic transcription and the video file. It also contains a large amount of annotations automatically created by SPPAS; - the
plugins
directory with one plugin. Others are available on the website; - the
workspaces
directory with an example of a workspace; - the
sppas
directory contains the program itself, it’s the SPPAS software itself; - the
resources
directory contains data that are used by automatic annotations (lexicons, dictionaries, …); - the
documentation
directory contains:- the terms of the licenses
- the printable documentation
- the printable resources documentation
- the printable XRA file format documentation
- the printable version of the main reference published in
the Phonetician
journal - the orthographic transcription convention
- the folder
scripting_solutions
is a set of python scripts corresponding to the exercises proposed in the chapterScripting with Python and SPPAS
Update
SPPAS is constantly being improved and new packages are published frequently (about 10 versions a year). It is important to update regularly in order to get the latest features and corrections.
Updating SPPAS consists of downloading, decompressing and launching the setup.
Features
How to use SPPAS?
There are three main ways to use SPPAS:
- The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is as user-friendly as
possible. It requires wxPython to be installed, i.e. to check
wxpython
feature
during the Setup step.- double-click on
sppas.bat
file, under Windows; - double-click on
sppas.command
file, under MacOS or Linux.
- double-click on
- The Command-line User Interface (CLI), with a set of programs, each one essentially independent of the others, that can be run on its own at the level of the shell.
- Advanced users can also access directly the Application Programming Interface - API. Scripting with Python and SPPAS provides the more powerful way.
What SPPAS can do?
Features of SPPAS can be divided into 3 main categories:
- Annotate automatically or semi-automatically;
- Analyze annotated data;
- Convert from/to a large variety of file formats.
The SPPAS website contains the list of the features and how most of the automatic annotations can be organized in an annotation workflow. See https://sppas.org/features.html
Main and important recommendations
About files
There is a list of important things to keep in mind while annotating with SPPAS. They are summarized as follows and detailed in the chapters of this documentation:
- Speech audio files for automatic annotations:
- only
wav
andau
files are supported - only mono (= one channel) files are supported
- frame rate is preferably 16000hz
- bit rate is preferably 16 bits
- good recording quality is expected. It is obviously required to never convert from a compressed file, as mp3 for example.
- only
- Annotated data files:
- UTF-8 encoding only
- It is recommended to use only US-ASCII characters in file names, obviously it includes its path.
About automatic annotations
The quality of the results for most of the automatic annotations is highly influenced by the quality of the data the annotation takes in input. This is a politically correct way to say: Garbage in, garbage out!
Annotations are based on the use of linguistic resources. Resources for several languages are gently shared and freely available or downloadable. The quality of the automatic annotations is largely influenced by the quality of the linguistic resources.
About linguistic resources
Users are of crucial importance for resource development.
Do not hesitate to help in checking resource files and sharing your corrections with the community.
The users of SPPAS are invited to contribute to improve them. They can release the improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
Any help is welcome to improve existing resources or to create new ones.