PDF (Online Text) - EURAC

Table 1: SpeechCluster command-line tools
Tool Function
segFake ‘Fake autosegmentation’ of a speech audio file
segInter Interpolates labels into a segmented but unlabelled segment tier
segMerge Merges separate label files
segReplace Converts labels in a label file
segSwitch Converts label file format
splitAll Splits audio/label file pairs
3.2 Using SpeechCluster I: The Tools
a) SegSwitch
SegSwitch is a label file format converter. It converts label files between any of the
formats supported by SpeechCluster (currently, Praat TextGrid, esps and the various
HTK formats [i.e., the simple .lab format and the multi-file .mlf format]). This kind of
format conversion is a very common task. For example, HTK requires files to be in its
own esps-like format, but our team prefers to handlabel files in Praat, which outputs
its own TextGrid format. Festival uses an esps-like format that is slightly different
from HTK’s.
SegSwitch has a simple command-line interface (see Table 2), in which single files
or whole directories can be converted easily and perfectly.
Usage:
Examples:
Table 2: segSwitch usage
segSwitch -i -o
segSwitch -d -o
segSwitch -i example.lab -o example.TextGrid
segSwitch -d labDir -o textGrid
A simple facility like this has a remarkable effect on the efficiency of a team. The
team no longer has to worry about in what file format they have to work. They can
concentrate on the research task converting files in and out of particular formats as
needed. In a sense, the two parts of the work- the research and the bookkeeping-
have been separated, and the bookkeeping is done by the tools. This division of labour
is repeated between the tools and the SpeechCluster module itself. As much of the
low-level data manipulation as possible is carried out by SpeechCluster, so that the
tools themselves can be written in simple, task-oriented terms.
Table 3 shows the main code for segSwitch (excluding the command-line parsing and
the loop over files in a directory): all of the work of file format conversion is done by
175