About the author

• SPPAS is a scientific computer software package written and maintained by Brigitte Bigi

• CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage, in Aix-en-Provence, France

• Research topics are related to:

  1. Multimodal corpora: collect, annotate, analyze
  2. Multilinguality

Corpus and annotation

• Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) of “real world”.
• Corpus annotation is a path to greater linguistic understanding.

Corpus annotation “can be defined as the practice of adding interpretative, linguistic information to an electronic corpus of spoken and/or written language data. ‘Annotation’ can also refer to the end-product of this process” (Leech, 1997).

Annotations

• Annotation is not an end in itself - it is a basis for further analyses
• Annotations should be time-synchronized. Temporal information makes it possible to describe simultaneous behaviours:
  • of different levels in an utterance (e.g. prosody and locution)
  • of different modalities (e.g. speech and gesture)
  • of different speakers or extralinguistic events

Annotation software

• Manual annotation
  • Audacity, Praat, Elan, Anvil, Winpitch, AnnotationPro…
• Automatic annotation:
  • The current state-of-the-art in Computational Linguistics allows many annotation tasks to be semi- or fully- automated:
    • MarsaTag (morpho-syntax for French)
    • MediaPipe
    • …

• Each annotation that can be done automatically must be done automatically!

• Because revising is faster and easier than annotating… if the automatic system is “good enough”.

Before using any automatic annotation tool/software, it is important to consider its error rate (where applicable) and to estimate how those errors will affect the purpose for the annotated corpora.

SPPAS is an awarded Research Software

• Research global approaches:
  • methods as language-independent as possible;
  • the possibility to adapt technologies to low-resourced languages.
• Award “Accessit” Special Jury Prize - 2022:
  • The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation presented the 1st Open Science Awards for Open Source Research Software.

  • 

Multi-Lingual approaches to the automatic annotation of speech

• SPPAS is designed and developed to handle multiple language corpora and/or tasks with the same algorithms in the same software environment.
• SPPAS emphasizes new practices in the methodology of tool developments:
  • considering problems with a generic multi-lingual aspect,
  • sharing resources,
  • putting the end-users in control of their own computing.
• Only the resources are language-specific and the approach is based on the simplest resources possible.

Resources extend

• Phoneticians are of crucial importance for resource development
  • they can contribute to improve the resources used by automatic systems.
• New versions are systematically released to the public and serve to benefit of the whole community.

Resources extend (continued)

• Resources are distributed under the terms of a public license, so that SPPAS users:
  • have free access to the application source code and the resources of the software they use,
  • are free to share the software and resources with other people,
  • are free to modify the software and resources,
  • are free to publish their modified versions of the software and resources.

SPPAS: Main reference 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.

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The context

• SPPAS was created in the scope of annotating automatically and exploring large multi-modal corpora
• A workflow was defined while creating CID - Corpus of Interactional Data
• It was then applied to create new corpora

The corpus creation workflow

Step 1: Recording speech

• One channel per speaker
• Anechoic room, or an environment with no/low noise
• Audio: for automatic annotation tools:
  • Any un-compressed file format, commonly WAVE
  • 16000Hz / 16bits is enough
• Audio: for manual annotation tools:
  • Any un-compressed file format
  • 48000Hz / 16bits is of high quality

Step 2: Search for Inter-Pausal Units

• Parameters to define manually:
  • fix the minimum silence duration
  • fix the minimum speech duration
• As results:
  • speech and silences are time-aligned automatically
  • a manual verification is highly recommended

Step 3: Orthographic Transcription

• Any transcription must follow a convention
• In speech (particularly in spontaneous speech), many phonetic variations occur:
  • some of these phonologically known variants are predictable
  • but many others are still unpredictable (especially invented words, regional words or words borrowed from another language)
• The orthographic transcription must be enriched:
  • it must be a representation of what is “perceived” in the signal.

Step 4: Speech segmentation

• In SPPAS, this problem is divided into 3 different tasks:
  1. Text normalization
  2. Phonetization
  3. Alignment
• Allows a fully automatic annotation, or a semi-automatic one
• See the tutorial ‘Phonemes and words segmentation’ for details

Other steps:

• On the basis of the time-aligned phonemes/tokens, other automatic annotations:
  • Syllables
  • Repetitions
  • TGA
  • …
• Analysis:
  • Filter data
  • Statistics
  • …

Interested in knowing more?

• You can see a full presentation here if you are interested in knowing more. It was created in 2015 and wasn’t updated since! However, it is general enough and can be of great help:

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(Step 1) Recording Speech

Recording audio

• The resolution of the capture devices (microphones, framerate, file format, software) has a determining influence on the quality of the corpus, and so on the annotations.
• Lack of standardization means that fewer researchers will be able to work with those signals.

Recording audio: software tools

• A short list of software tool we already tested and checked:
  • audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
  • sox http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Recording speech: SPPAS requirements

• wav and au audio file formats

• an audio file is MONO: only one channel

• good recording quality is expected

• Example:

(Step 2) Inter-Pausal Units

IPUs = sounding segments

• The orthographic transcription must be pre-segmented

How to do it?

• SPPAS can automatically perform the IPUs segmentation
  • then a manual verification is recommended
  • see the related tutorial and/or the documentation for details
• but IPUs will be segmented manually:
  • if the audio signal is of poor quality;
  • if there are more than one speaker recorded in the same channel.

(Step 3) Transcribing Speech

Orthographic transcription:

• must include:
  • Filled pauses
  • Short pauses
  • Repeats
  • Truncated words
  • Noises
  • Laughter
• should include:
  • un-regular elisions
  • un-regular liaisons
  • specific pronunciations
• may include:
  • all elisions

Orthographic transcription: SPPAS convention

• truncated words, noted as a ’-’ at the end of the token string (an ex- example)
• noises, noted by a ’*’
• laughter, noted by a ’@’
• short pauses, noted by a ’+’
• elisions, mentioned in parenthesis
• specific pronunciations, noted with brackets [example,eczap]
• comments are noted inside braces or brackets without using comma {this} or [this and this]
• liaisons, noted between ’=’ (an =n= example)
• morphological variants with <like,lie ok>
• proper name annotation, like $John S. Doe$

Transcription example 1 (Conversational speech)

• Manual orthographic transcription:

donc + i- i(l) prend la è- recette et tout bon i(l) vé- i(l) dit bon [okay, k]

• Automatically extracted standard orthograph:
  • donc il prend la recette et tout bon il dit bon okay
• Automatically extracted tokens:
  • donc + i i prend la è recette et tout bon i vé i dit bon k

Transcription example 2 (Conversational speech)

• Manual orthographic transcription:

ah mais justement c’était pour vous vendre bla bla bla bl(a) le mec i(l) te l’a emboucané + en plus i(l) lu(i) a [acheté,acheuté] le truc et le mec il est parti j(e) dis putain le mec i(l) voulait

• Automatically extracted standard orthography:
  • ah mais justement c’était pour vous vendre bla bla bla bla le mec il te l’a emboucané en plus il lui a acheté le truc et le mec il est parti je dis putain le mec il voulait
• Automatically extracted tokens:
  • ah mais justement c’était pour vous vendre bla bla bla bl le mec i te l’a emboucané + en plus i lu a acheuté le truc et le mec il est parti j dis putain le mec i voulait

Transcription example 3 (GrenelleII)

• Manual orthographic transcription:

euh les apiculteurs + et notamment b- on ne sait pas très bien + quelle est la cause de mortalité des abeilles m(ais) enfin il y a quand même + euh peut-êt(r)e des attaques systémiques

• Automatically extracted standard orthography:
  • les apiculteurs et notamment on ne sait pas très bien quelle est la cause de mortalité des abeilles mais enfin il y a quand même peut-être des attaques systémiques
• Automatically extracted faked orthography:
  • euh les apiculteurs + et notamment b on ne sait pas très bien + quelle est la cause de mortalité des abeilles m enfin il y a quand même + euh peut-ête des attaques systémiques

Annotated files: recommendations

• UTF-8 encoding only
• only US-ASCII characters in file names (nor in the path obviously)

• Supported file formats to open/save (software, extension):

  • SPPAS: xra
  • Praat: TextGrid, PitchTier, IntensityTier
  • Elan: eaf
  • AnnotationPro: antx
  • HTK: lab, mlf
  • Sclite: ctm, stm
  • Phonedit: mrk
  • Excel/OpenOffice/R/…: csv
  • Subtitles: sub, srt
• Supported file formats for import only (software, extension):
  • Transcriber: trs
  • Anvil: anvil
  • Xtrans: tdf
  • Audacity: txt

Supported file formats

Always remember…

• Each step - from collecting the recordings to the analyses of the annotations, depends on the previous one, and:

Garbage in, garbage out

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