Evaluation of forced alignment of code-mixed speech: the case of Hindi-English

Abstract:Code-mixed speech poses unique challenges to forced alignment: expanded inventories, orthographic errors, and speaker variation. We evaluate forced alignment of Hindi-English code-mixed speech using the Montreal Forced Aligner. We address 2 problems: (1) free variation involving native vs non-native pairs and (2) phonemic boundary detection for mid-utterance English words. Bootstrapping strategies substantially outperform unmodified lexicons. Acoustic models trained on sentence-level code-mixed data achieve a mean error of 4.15ms, ie. ten times lower than monolingual Hindi (38.18ms) or isolated English (37.58ms) alternatives. Principled lexicon design and code-mixed training data are both essential for reliable alignment of bilingual speech.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2607.25581 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.25581v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.25581 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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