Automated Phonetic Transcription Comparison Tool

Abstract

The Automated Phonetic Transcription (APT) Comparison Tool (APTct) is an online tool that facilitates the comparison of phonetic transcriptions for a variety of clinical and research purposes. It uses an IPA graphical keyboard for straightforward transcription input, and a custom edit distance algorithm designed to align transcriptions in an intuitive way and then calculate differences quantitatively. This allows for objective scoring of transcriptions of even severely impaired productions, which may be difficult to score via traditional comparison methods. APTct also includes support for comparing narrow phonetic transcriptions with diacritics. It does this by assigning gradated penalties for phoneme edits versus diacritic edits: For any substitution, addition, or deletion of an entire phoneme, the algorithm assigns a penalty of 1; for any substitution, addition, or deletion of a diacritic, the algorithm assigns a penalty of 0.5. APTct also provides average edit distance scores for all transcription comparisons input in a session. Potential uses of the tool include the following: tracking a client’s productions over time and in response to treatment, estimating the severity of sound production accuracy impairments, and calculating inter-rater reliability of multiple transcribers.