Natural speech data on many languages have been collected by language documentation projects aiming to preserve lingustic and cultural traditions in audivisual records. These data hold great potential for large-scale cross-linguistic research into phonetics and language processing. Major obstacles to utilizing such data for typological studies include the non-homogenous nature of file formats and annotation conventions found both across and within archived collections. Moreover, time-aligned audio transcriptions are typically only available at the level of broad (multi-word) phrases but not at the word and segment levels. We report on solutions developed for these issues within the DoReCo (DOcumentation REference COrpus) project. DoReCo aims at providing time-aligned transcriptions for at least 50 collections of under-resourced languages. This paper gives a preliminary overview of the current state of the project and details our workflow, in particular standardization of formats and conventions, the addition of segmental alignments with WebMAUS, and DoReCo’s applicability for subsequent research programs. By making the data accessible to the scientific community, DoReCo is designed to bridge the gap between language documentation and linguistic inquiry.

Language documentation projects supported by recent funding intiatives have created a large number of multimedia corpora of typologically diverse languages. Most of these corpora provide a manual alignment of transcription and audio data at the level of larger units, such as sentences or intonation units. Their usefulness both for corpus-linguistic and psycholinguistic research and for the development of tools and teaching materials could, however, be increased by achieving a more fine-grained alignment of transcription and audio at the word or even phoneme level. Since most language documentation corpora contain data on small languages, there usually do not exist any speech recognizers or acoustic models specifically trained on these languages. We therefore investigate the feasibility of untrained forced alignment for such corpora. We report on an evaluation of the tool (Web)MAUS (Kisler, 2012) on several language documentation corpora and discuss practical issues in the application of forced alignment. Our evaluation shows that (Web)MAUS with its existing acoustic models combined with simple grapheme-to-phoneme conversion can be successfully used for word-level forced alignment of a diverse set of languages without additional training, especially if a manual prealignment of larger annotation units is already avaible.