Praaline: Integrating Tools for Speech Corpus Research
George Christodoulides · 2014
This paper presents Praaline, an open-source software system for managing, annotating, analysing and visualising speech corpora.Researchers working with speech corpora are often faced with multiple tools and formats, and they need to work with ever-increasing amounts of data in a collaborative way.Praaline integrates and extends existing time-proven tools for spoken corpora analysis (Praat, Sonic Visualiser and a bridge to the R statistical package) in a modular system, facilitating automation and reuse.Users are exposed to an integrated, user-friendly interface from which to access multiple tools.Corpus metadata and annotations may be stored in a database, locally or remotely, and users can define the metadata and annotation structure.Users may run a customisable cascade of analysis steps, based on plug-ins and scripts, and update the database with the results.The corpus database may be queried, to produce aggregated data-sets.Praaline is extensible using Python or C++ plug-ins, while Praat and R scripts may be executed against the corpus data.A series of visualisations, editors and plug-ins are provided.Praaline is free software, released under the GPL license.