Comparison of forced-alignment speech recognition and humans for generating reference VAD

Abstract

This present paper aims to answer the question whether forced-alignment speech recognition can be used as an alternative to humans in generating reference Voice Activity Detection (VAD) transcriptions. An investigation of the level of agreement between automatic/manual VAD transcriptions and the reference ones produced by a human expert was carried out. Thereafter, statistical analysis was employed on the automatically produced and the collected manual transcriptions. Experimental results confirmed that forced-alignment speech recognition can provide accurate and consistent VAD labels.