English-based acoustic models perform well in the forced alignment of two English-based Pacific Creoles
Sam Passmore, Lila San Roque, Kirsty Gillespie, Saurabh Kumar Nath, Kira Davey, Keira Mullan, Tim Cawley, Jennifer Biggs
Abstract
Expanding the breadth languages used to study sociophonetic variation and change is an important step in the theoretical development of sociophonetics. As data archives grow, forced alignment can accelerate the study of sociophonetic variation in minority languages. This paper examines the application of English and custom-made acoustic models on the alignment of vowels in two Pacific Creoles, Tok Pisin (59 hours) and Bislama (38.5 hours). We find that English models perform acceptably well in both languages, and as well as humans in vowel environments described as ‘Highly Reliable’. Custom models performed better in Bislama than Tok Pisin. We end the paper with recommendations on the use of cross-linguistic acoustic models in the case of English-Based Creoles.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{passmore-etal-2025-english,
title = "{E}nglish-based acoustic models perform well in the forced alignment of two {E}nglish-based Pacific Creoles",
author = "Passmore, Sam and
Roque, Lila San and
Gillespie, Kirsty and
Nath, Saurabh Kumar and
Davey, Kira and
Mullan, Keira and
Cawley, Tim and
Biggs, Jennifer and
Billington, Rosey and
Evans, Bethwyn and
Thieberger, Nick and
Evans, Nicholas and
Barth, Danielle",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1505/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1505",
pages = "31172--31183",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}