This project aims to develop new tools for phonetics research on large speech corpora without requiring traditional phonetic annotations by humans. The idea is to adapt tools from speech recognition to replace the costly and time-consuming annotations usually required for phonetics research.
This project was originally started by an NSF grant “New tools and methods for very-large-scale phonetics research” to UPenn (opens in new tab) and SRI (opens in new tab), with a Microsoft researcher as a consultant.
More recently, work on computational phonetics has moved to automatic assessment of read speech in collaboration with Jorge Proença at University of Coimbra, Portugal.