CAST

Computer Assisted Segmentation Tools (CAST) is a helper toolkit for phonetic analysis. Based on config files and metadata it generates a dumb segmentation that can then be adjusted in Praat or other TextGrid editing programs.

CAST does not do forced alignment. There is no acoustic (nor articulatory) analysis of speech under the hood, only some adjustable heuristics for selecting a reasonable guess for where the speech is for the utterance and word levels and then a totally rule-based segmentation based on a pronunciation dictionary.

CAST does provide a segmentation template that is meant to be easy for a human annotator to adjust. For this reason all automatically generated segments are of equal length within a given word.

CAST does do the writing and boundary creation for you. No need to go back and correct typos in the transcription -- at least on the phonological level -- and a good deal less carpal tunnel strain because of reduced number of mouse clicks. And a significantly more relaxed feel about the segmentation process in general.

CAST is aware that data beyond simple audio exist and will include features in the future that take this into account.

Current version is 0.1.0

See Changelog for what is new.

Roadmap to 1.0

CAST is going to be re-organised a bit in the very near future (during autumn of 2024 if nothing weird happens). Version 1.0 will include:

• Four commandline commands:
  • add which add Tiers to TextGrids up to the specified level (see below). add will also generate the TextGrids if they do not already exist.
    • The Tier levels will be L0=[File], L1=[Utterance], L2=Word, L3=Phonemes, L4=Phones. Levels whose names are in brackets can be turned off as a configuration option. All preceding levels (that haven't been turned off) above the requested level will be added to the TextGrid. The File level is turned off by default when not running concatenate. All levels maybe renamed as a configuration option.
  • concatenate produces a concatenated wav file and corresponding TextGrid for working on multiple recordings in Praat.
  • extract extracts TextGrids corresponding to individual recordings from a previously concatenated set of recordings.
  • remove-double-word-boundaries cleans up extra word boundaries from TextGrids -- i.e. empty space between words.
• Configuration file for project specific settings like Tier names, if an utterance level should be included, and a bunch of other things.
• An update to this README, possibly with easier installation.
• Documentation.

Installation

New ways while waiting for upload to pypi

• Ask Pertti for the wheel files and install from them or
• Do a developer install

Old way

Following steps should lead to a working installation. Please, let me know if anything doesn't work. I have only very superficially tested installation on Linux and not at all on any other systems.

• Get Conda and Mamba.
• Either:
  • Get git and (fork and) clone the repository to your local system or
  • download the repository.
• Create the virtual environment for CAST with mamba create -f cast_stable_conda_env.yaml and activate it with conda activate cast_stable.
• If everything worked, you can run cast by calling python cast.py [config file]. See Running below for more instructions.

Files and directories

• source/computer_assisted_segmentation_tools is the directory that contains the processing logic.
• cast or computer-assisted-segmentation-tools is the commandline interface for CAST.
• .gitignore tells git which directories and files to ignore.
• local_files/ is not included in the distribution, but it is ignored by git. If you are working on CAST with git, this is the place to put your local test files and generated results to keep git from seeing them.
• cast_exclude_example.yml is an example of an exclusion list. The file is commented to make it easier to create your own based on it. To avoid a host of issues, the format is Strict YAML rather than regular YAML. Refer to documentation here for details of the format and the file itself for how fields are handled.
• cast_stable_conda_env.yaml is the specification for the conda/python virtual environment in which CAST runs. Probably easiest to build with mamba rather than conda.

Code

CAST is written in Python with some external packages and configuration/setting files in StrictYAML. Some of the code base (particularly ) is shared with SATKIT and there is a possibility that CAST will become a submodule in SATKIT or that there will be some other kind of integration to avoid code duplication.

Running

First, create a config .yaml file with the correct options. There are some examples included with CAST.

Concatenation

To concatenate, run either python cast.py config.yaml or python cast.py concatenate config.yaml.

DEPRECATION NOTICE: The default status of the concatenate command should already be considered deprecated. In the future, CAST will most likely be integrated into SATKIT and the default will be to create the individual TextGrids directly with pre-generated (dumb) segmentation. This is because SATKIT makes it easy to edit a lot of individual recordings without needing to do the 'select objects - open for editing - edit - save - close window - start again with select object' dance that Praat requires.

Extraction

To extract run python cast.py extract config.yaml.

NOTE! Any existing TextGrids will currently be overwritten without warning.