Running the aligner

Note

We assume Unix-style slashes in paths here. If you’re using Windows, change the slashes to backslashes \.

Common options for both aligner executables

-b NUMBER

--beam NUMBER

Beam width to use in aligning (default is 100), higher beam is more permissive for longer files or less accurate transcriptions.

-s NUMBER

--speaker_characters NUMBER

Number of characters to use to identify speakers; if not specified, the aligner assumes that the directory name is the identifier for the speaker. Additionally, it accepts the value prosodylab to use the second field of a _ delimited file name, following the convention of labelling production data in the ProsodyLab at McGill.

-t DIRECTORY

--temp_directory DIRECTORY

Temporary directory root to use for aligning, default is ~/Documents/MFA

-j NUMBER

--num_jobs NUMBER

Number of jobs to use; defaults to 3, set higher if you have more processors available and would like to align faster

-v

--verbose

The aligner will print out more debugging information if present

-c

--clean

Temporary files in ~/Documents/MFA and the output directory will be removed prior to aligning. This is good to use when aligning a new dataset, but it shares a name with a previously aligned dataset.

-h

--help

Display help message for the executable

-i

--ignore_exceptions

Ignore exceptions in loading the corpus. An error will be thrown if two files share the same name, adding this flag will ensure utterance names will be unique by appending numbers to the ends of the file names.

-q

--quiet

Flag to ignore stop checks like having OOV items

Align using pretrained models

The Montreal Forced Aligner comes with pretrained models/dictionaries for:

• English - trained from the LibriSpeech data set (LibriSpeech corpus)

• Quebec French - coming soon

Command template:

bin/mfa_align corpus_directory dictionary_path acoustic_model_path output_directory

Note

acoustic_model_path can also be a language that has been pretrained (“english” at the moment but other languages coming soon)

Extra options (in addition to the common ones listed above):

-n

--no_speaker_adaptation

Flag to disable using speaker adaptation, useful if aligning a small dataset or if speed is more important

-e

--errors

Flag for whether utterance transcriptions should be checked for errors prior to aligning

Steps to align:

1. Open terminal or command window, and change directory to montreal-forced-aligner folder

2. Type bin/mfa_align followed by the arguments described above

Note

On Mac/Unix, to save time typing out the path, you can drag a folder from Finder into Terminal and it will put the full path to that folder into your command.

On Windows, you can hold Shift and right-click on a folder/file. Select “Copy as path…” and paste it into the command window.

Align using only the data set

Command template:

bin/mfa_train_and_align corpus_directory dictionary_path output_directory

Extra options (in addition to the common ones listed above):

-f

--fast

The aligner will do alignment with half the normal amount of iterations

-o PATH

--output_model_path PATH

Path to a zip file to save the results’ acoustic models (and dictionary) from training to use in future aligning

--no_dict

If this option is specified, the pronunciation for any given word will be the orthography, useful for transparent orthographies that have near one-to-one correspondence between sounds and alphabet symbols

Note

The arguments dictionary_path and --no_dict are mutually exclusive and one of the two must be specified to align a data set. Dictionaries can also be generated through using a G2P model with the command generate_dictionary.

Steps to align:

1. Open terminal or command window, and change directory to the montreal-forced-aligner folder

2. Type bin/mfa_train_and_align followed by the arguments described above

An example command:

bin/mfa_train_and_align ~/2_French_training ~/French/fr-QuEu.dict ~/2_French_aligned -s 7 -f -v

This command will train a new model and align the files in ~/2_French_training using the dictionary file ~/French/fr-QuEu.dict, and save the output TextGrids to ~/2_French_training. It will take the first 7 characters of the file name to be the speaker ID number. It will be fast (do half as many training iterations) and verbose (output more info to Terminal during training).

Once the aligner finishes, the resulting TextGrids will be in the specified output directory. Training can take several hours for large datasets.