BFA: Real-time Multilingual Text-to-speech Forced Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Rehman, Abdul, Cai, Jingyao, Zhang, Jian-Jun, Yang, Xiaosong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Rehman, Abdul
Cai, Jingyao
Zhang, Jian-Jun
Yang, Xiaosong
author_facet Rehman, Abdul
Cai, Jingyao
Zhang, Jian-Jun
Yang, Xiaosong
contents We present Bournemouth Forced Aligner (BFA), a system that combines a Contextless Universal Phoneme Encoder (CUPE) with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC)based decoder. BFA introduces explicit modelling of inter-phoneme gaps and silences and hierarchical decoding strategies, enabling fine-grained boundary prediction. Evaluations on TIMIT and Buckeye corpora show that BFA achieves competitive recall relative to Montreal Forced Aligner at relaxed tolerance levels, while predicting both onset and offset boundaries for richer temporal structure. BFA processes speech up to 240x faster than MFA, enabling faster than real-time alignment. This combination of speed and silence-aware alignment opens opportunities for interactive speech applications previously constrained by slow aligners.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23147
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BFA: Real-time Multilingual Text-to-speech Forced Alignment
Rehman, Abdul
Cai, Jingyao
Zhang, Jian-Jun
Yang, Xiaosong
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
We present Bournemouth Forced Aligner (BFA), a system that combines a Contextless Universal Phoneme Encoder (CUPE) with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC)based decoder. BFA introduces explicit modelling of inter-phoneme gaps and silences and hierarchical decoding strategies, enabling fine-grained boundary prediction. Evaluations on TIMIT and Buckeye corpora show that BFA achieves competitive recall relative to Montreal Forced Aligner at relaxed tolerance levels, while predicting both onset and offset boundaries for richer temporal structure. BFA processes speech up to 240x faster than MFA, enabling faster than real-time alignment. This combination of speed and silence-aware alignment opens opportunities for interactive speech applications previously constrained by slow aligners.
title BFA: Real-time Multilingual Text-to-speech Forced Alignment
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23147