SPPAS: a tool for the phonetic segmentation of speech

SPPAS is a tool to produce automatic annotations which include utterance, word, syllabic and phonemic segmentations from a recorded speech sound and its transcription. SPPAS is distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License. It was successfully applied during the Evalita 2011 campaign, on Italian map-task dialogues. It can also deal with French, English and Chinese and there is an easy way to add other languages. The paper describes the development of resources and free tools, consisting of acoustic models, phonetic dictionaries, and libraries and programs to deal with these data. All of them are publicly available.