Adopt aligner from "Huang et al., Less Peaky and More Accurate CTC Forced Alignment by Label Priors"

[dmitry-mli]

🚀 The feature

Consider on-boarding aligner from Huang et al., Less Peaky and More Accurate CTC Forced Alignment by Label Priors (@huangruizhe) to the existing set of aligners given it improves alignment accuracy compared to the existing Wav2Vec2 CTC aligner by up to 60% P50 on English.

Motivation, pitch

Today, torch audio offers Forced Alignment through a simple extendable interface. The recently published aligner Huang et al., Less Peaky and More Accurate CTC Forced Alignment by Label Priors (github) drives the word boundary error (WBE) down (better) compared to Wav2Vec2. We (@dmitry-mli @jamesr66a @websterbei) explored the model and had WBE for our English samples decrease by up to 60% for P50, 45% for P70 and 15% for P95 compared to Wav2Vec2 CTC alignment.

Alternatives

This request is related to a particular research.

Additional context

Thanks for consideration. @huangruizhe @jamesr66a @websterbei

[huangruizhe]

Thanks for your interests in our work and sharing the nice results! As we have been switching between projects, things have been greatly delayed. Regarding the plan, I will be more available in late September and October. I will work on it at that time!

[dmitry-mli]

Looking forward to it, thank you!