RI: Medium: New Tools and Methods for Very-Large-Scale Phonetics Research

语音学领域在上个世纪经历了两次革命：20世纪50年代声谱仪的出现和70年代计算机的应用。如今，数字多媒体、网络和海量存储领域的进步预示着第三次革命的到来：从对小型个人数据集的研究转向对已发表的语料库的分析，这些语料库的规模要大几个数量级。人们迫切需要这些新的数据体，以使语音学领域能够跨语言、跨越多种类型的个人、社会和语境差异来开发和测试假说。然而，与语音技术研究相比，语音科学到目前为止几乎没有利用这个机会，因为访问这些语音学研究资源需要工具和方法，这些工具和方法现在对大多数研究人员来说是不完整的、未经测试的和无法获得的。该项目通过整合、调整和改进语音技术研究中开发的技术来填补这一空白，主要是强制数字音频与来自正字法抄本的语音表示法对齐。这项研究将帮助语音学领域进入一个新时代：使用从数百小时到数十万小时的非常大的语音语料库进行研究。

The field of phonetics has experienced two revolutions in the last century: the advent of the sound spectrograph in the 1950s and the application of computers beginning in the 1970s. Today, advances in digital multimedia, networking and mass storage are promising a third revolution: a movement from the study of small, individual datasets to the analysis of published corpora that are several orders of magnitude larger.These new bodies of data are badly needed, to enable the field of phonetics to develop and test hypotheses across languages and across the many types of individual, social and contextual variation. However, in contrast to speech technology research, speech science has so far taken relatively little advantage of this opportunity, because access to these resources for phonetics research requires tools and methods that are now incomplete, untested, and inaccessible to most researchers.This project fills this gap by integrating, adapting and improving techniques developed in speech technology research, mainly forced alignment of digital audio with phonetic representations derived from orthographic transcripts. The research will help the field of phonetics to enter a new era: conducting research using very large speech corpora, in the range from hundreds of hours to hundreds of thousands of hours.