Praaline: Integrating Tools for Speech Corpus Research

George Christodoulides


Abstract
This paper presents Praaline, an open-source software system for managing, annotating, analysing and visualising speech corpora. Researchers working with speech corpora are often faced with multiple tools and formats, and they need to work with ever-increasing amounts of data in a collaborative way. Praaline integrates and extends existing time-proven tools for spoken corpora analysis (Praat, Sonic Visualiser and a bridge to the R statistical package) in a modular system, facilitating automation and reuse. Users are exposed to an integrated, user-friendly interface from which to access multiple tools. Corpus metadata and annotations may be stored in a database, locally or remotely, and users can define the metadata and annotation structure. Users may run a customisable cascade of analysis steps, based on plug-ins and scripts, and update the database with the results. The corpus database may be queried, to produce aggregated data-sets. Praaline is extensible using Python or C++ plug-ins, while Praat and R scripts may be executed against the corpus data. A series of visualisations, editors and plug-ins are provided. Praaline is free software, released under the GPL license (www.praaline.org).
Anthology ID:
L14-1059
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
31–34
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1078_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
George Christodoulides. 2014. Praaline: Integrating Tools for Speech Corpus Research. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 31–34, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Praaline: Integrating Tools for Speech Corpus Research (Christodoulides, LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1078_Paper.pdf