FAAL: a Feature-based Aligning ALgorithm
Marwan Kilani · Language Dynamics and Change · 2020
Abstract In this article I present FAAL, a new Feature-based Aligning ALgorithm that can be used for the alignment of phonetically transcribed lexical items according to the comparison of phonetic features. The algorithm can be run on any pair of phonetically transcribed words without requiring any specific setting or tuning, although various parameters of its implementation as .jar library can indeed be modified by the user, if needed. The structure and work-flow of the algorithm are described in the first part of the paper. In the second part FAAL is tested against previously proposed algorithms in a test case involving two different datasets. FAAL in its default configuration outperforms all of them. FAAL is distributed in the form of a .jar Java library. The description of this Java library and the details about the settings and configuration of its methods are provided on-line, in my github repository at https://github.com/MKilani/FAAL .