Abstract Forced aligners have revolutionized sociophonetics, but while there are several forced aligners available, there are few systematic comparisons of their performance. Here, we consider four major forced aligners used in sociophonetics today: MAUS, FAVE, LaBB-CAT and MFA. Through comparisons with human coders, we find that both aligner and phonological context affect the quality of automated alignments of vowels extracted from English sociolinguistic interview data. MFA and LaBB-CAT produce the highest quality alignments, in some cases not significantly different from human alignment, followed by FAVE, and then MAUS. Aligners are less accurate placing boundaries following a vowel than preceding it, and they vary in accuracy across manner of articulation, particularly for following boundaries. These observations allow us to make specific recommendations for manual correction of forced alignment.

中文翻译：

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比较用于社会语音研究的强制对准器的性能

摘要强制对准器已经彻底改变了社会语音学，但是尽管有几种强制对准器可用，但对其性能的系统比较却很少。在这里，我们考虑当今社会语音学中使用的四种主要的强制对准器：MAUS，FAVE，LaBB-CAT和MFA。通过与人类编码员的比较，我们发现对齐器和语音环境都会影响从英语社会语言访谈数据中提取的元音自动对齐的质量。MFA和LaBB-CAT产生最高质量的比对，在某些情况下与人的比对没有显着差异，其次是FAVE，然后是MAUS。对齐器在元音之后的放置边界比在其之前的放置边界准确度低，并且它们在连接方式上的准确性有所不同，尤其是在跟随边界时。