Montreal Forced Aligner

Multilingual word-level forced alignment using MMS and learned dynamic programming outperforms MFA

Researchers present a forced alignment system combining Meta's Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) model with a self-supervised phoneme boundary detector (UnSupSeg) and a learned dynamic programming decoder. Trained on TIMIT and Buckeye, the system outperforms Montreal Forced Aligner and MMS-based alignment on both datasets and generalizes to unseen languages (Dutch, German, Hebrew) without additional training. The approach claims potential to scale to 1100+ languages supported by MMS, making it relevant for low-resource speech processing pipelines.