SAD-Based Italian Forced Alignment Strategies

The Evalita 2011 contest proposed two forced alignment tasks, word and phone segmentation, and two modalities, "open" and "closed". A system for each combination of task and modality has been proposed and submitted for evaluation. Direct use of Silence/Activity detection in forced alignment has been tested. Positive effects were shown in the acoustic model training step, especially when dealing with long pauses. The exploitation of multiple forced alignment systems through a voting procedure has also been tested.