MFA

The MFA Annotator integrates with the Montreal Forced Aligner, which can use words with phonemic transcriptions, and the corresponding audio, to force-align words and phones; i.e. determine the start and end time of each speech sound within each word, and thus the start/end times of the words.

Configuration parameters are encoded as a URL query string, e.g.
orthographyLayerId=orthography&dictionaryName=english&modelsName=english&wordAlignmentLayerId=word&phoneAlignmentLayerId=segment&utteranceTagLayerId=mfa

Parameters are:

orthographyLayerId

Input layer from which words come.

pronunciationLayerId

Input layer from which word pronunciations come. If you don't select this layer, you must specify a value for dictionaryName.

multilingualIPA

Set any non-empty value for this parameter to use the --multilingual_ipa switch, omit the parameter otherwise

dictionaryName

If you wish to use one of the available language dictionaries instead of specifying a Pronunciation Layer, specify the name with this parameter. Available dictionaries are listed at https://github.com/MontrealCorpusTools/mfa-models/tree/main/dictionary

modelsName

If you wish to use pre-trained acoustic models instead of training models from your speech data, specify the name with this parameter. If not specified, acoustic models will be trained from the speech itself. Available models are listed at https://github.com/MontrealCorpusTools/mfa-models/tree/main/acoustic

beam

This is the value for the --beam mfa parameter.

retryBeam

This is the value for the --retry-beam mfa parameter.

ignoreAlignmentStatuses

Set any non-empty value of this parameter to overwrite manual alignments, otherwise omit this parameter.

wordAlignmentLayerId

Output layer on which word alignments are saved. This can be word to update main word token alignments, or a phrase layer to save alignments separately from main word token alignments. If the specified layer doesn't exist, a phrase layer will be created.

phoneAlignmentLayerId

Output layer on which phone alignments are saved. This can be segment to update main phone segment alignments, or a phrase layer to save alignments separately from main phone segment alignments. If the specified layer doesn't exist, a phrase layer will be created.

utteranceTagLayerId

Optional output layer for a time stamp tagging each aligned utterance. If the specified layer doesn't exist, a phrase layer will be created.