A novel visualization tool for manual annotation when building large speech corpora

A novel visualized sound description, called sound dendrogram is proposed to make manual annotation easier whenbuilding large speech corpora. It is a lattice structure built from a group of “seed regions” and through an iteractive procedure of mergence. A simple but reliable extraction method of “seed regions” and advanced distance metric are adopted to construct the sound dendrogram, so that it can present speech’s structure character ranging from coarse to fine in a visualized way. Tests show that all phonemic boundaries are contained in the lattice structure of sound dendrogram and very easy to identify. Sound dendrogram can be a powerful assistant tool during the process of speech corpora’s manual annotation. Foundation item: Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (50099620) and the National High-Technology Development Program of China (2001 AA132050) Biography: SHE Kun (1979-), male. Ph.D. candidate, research direction: multimedia signal processing.