Speech Recognition – Setting up sclite word alignment

Word alignment is used to measure the accuracy of a decoder.  Sphinx tutorial references sclite from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This time I’m going to share some notes on how to run and setup sclite.

Running sclite

Sclite is a tool for scoring and evaluating the output of speech recognition by comparing the hypothesized text (HYP) output by the speech recognizer to the correct, or reference (REF) text. After comparing REF to HYP, (a process called alignment), statistics are gathered during the scoring process and a variety of reports can be produced to summarize the performance of the recognition system.

This is an example output using the files located src\sclite\testdata\tests.hyp and sclite\testdata\tests.ref:

Parameters:

• The '-h' option is a required argument which specifies the input hypothesis file.
• The '-r' option, a required argument, specifies the input reference file which the hypothesis file(s) are compared to.

sclite -h C:\Project\SpeechRecognition\CMUSphinx\3rdPartyLibs\sctk-2.4.3\src\sclite\testdata\tests.hyp -r C:\Project\SpeechRecognition\CMUSphinx\3rdPartyLibs\sctk-2.4.3\src\sclite\testdata\tests.ref

Setup  sctk-2.4.0-20091110-0958.tar.bz2 on Windows 7

I downloaded Speech Recognition Scoring Toolkit (SCTK) which includes the SCLITE, ASCLITE, tranfilt, hubscr, SLATreport and utf_filt scoring tools.

I could compile it with gcc version 3.4.4, found in the following MinGW setup package  mingw-get-inst-20101030.exe.

It was also necessary to modify 'src/rfilter1/makefile.in' and change the value of OPTIONS to be blank  (as specified in the instructions)

The following compilation error is thrown when compiling using gcc version 4.6.2:

recording.h:122:29: error: 'Filter::Filter' cannot appear in a constant-expression
recording.h:122:36: error: template argument 2 is invalid
recording.h:122:36: error: template argument 4 is invalid
make[3]: *** [main.o] Error 1

Setup sctk-2.4.2-20120810-0938.tar.bz2 on Windows 7

Something similar happened with this version, I could compile it with gcc version 3.4.4.

The following compilation error is thrown when using gcc version 4.6.2:

In file included from asctools.h:23:0,
                 from asctools.cpp:22:
timeval.h:33:8: error: redefinition of 'struct timeval'
c:\mingw\bin\../lib/gcc/mingw32/4.6.2/../../../../include/winsock2.h:109:8: error: previous definition of 'struct timeval'
make[2]: *** [asctools.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/c/Project/SpeechRecognition/CMUSphinx/3rdPartyLibs/
sctk-2.4.2/src/asclite/test'
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/c/Project/SpeechRecognition/CMUSphinx/3rdPartyLibs/
sctk-2.4.2/src/asclite'
make: *** [all] Error 2

This is thrown when compiling rfilter1

gcc  -o rfilter1 rfilter1.c
C:\Users\MANGEL~1\AppData\Local\Temp\ccuj1MU6.o:rfilter1.c:(.text+0x760): undefined reference to `strncmpi'
C:\Users\MANGEL~1\AppData\Local\Temp\ccuj1MU6.o:rfilter1.c:(.text+0x7c4): undefined reference to `strncmpi'
C:\Users\MANGEL~1\AppData\Local\Temp\ccuj1MU6.o:rfilter1.c:(.text+0x827): undefined reference to `strncmpi'
C:\Users\MANGEL~1\AppData\Local\Temp\ccuj1MU6.o:rfilter1.c:(.text+0x935): undefined reference to `strncmpi'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [rfilter1] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/c/Project/SpeechRecognition/CMUSphinx/3rdPartyLibs/sctk-2.4.2/src/rfilter1'
make: *** [all] Error 2

It is also possible to compile this with gcc version 4.6.2 after removing asclite tests and rfilter1 from make file.

After finishing the setup you are able to run sclite as described initially.

Resources:

• http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/tutorial.html
• http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig//tools/
• http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/tools.cfm
• sclite documentation ctk-2.4.3/doc/sclite.htm
• http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/speech-recognition-engines/can-nists-sclite-be-used-on-windows