Nanitrans: a speech labelling tool

Abstract

This paper deals with a description of NaniTrans, a tool for segmentation and labeling of speech. The tool is programmed to work on the MATLAB application interface, in any of the supported platforms (Unix, Windows, Macintosh). The tool has been designed to annotate large speech databases, which can be also partially preprocessed (but require manual supervision). It supports the definition of an environment of annotation: set of annotation levels (orthographic, phonetic, etc.), display mode (how to show information), graphic representation (waveform, spectrogram), keyboard short-cuts, etc. This configuration is then used on a speech database. A safe file locking system allows many annotators to work concurrently on the same speech database. The tool is very friendly and easy to use by non experienced annotators, and it is designed to optimize speed using both keyboard and mouse. New options or speech processing tools can be easily added by using any MATLAB or user defined function.