Forced alignment is an effective process to speed up linguistic research. However, most forced aligners are language-dependent, and under-resourced languages rarely have enough resources to train an acoustic model for an aligner. We present a new Finnish grapheme-based forced aligner and demonstrate its performance by aligning multiple Uralic languages and English as an unrelated language. We show that even a simple non-expert created grapheme-to-phoneme mapping can result in useful word alignments.

Peer reviewed