Forced Alignment Quiz

Answers and explanations appear as you take the quiz.

1. Given audio and its transcript, what output does forced alignment create?
   • Precise start and end timestamps for words or sounds in a known transcript
   • A translation into another language
   • A new transcript created without using supplied words
   • A noise-reduced audio file
2. Why is alignment called “forced”?
   • The model must increase recording volume
   • The model is constrained to fit the supplied transcript
   • A user must set each boundary by hand
   • The system translates the transcript
3. What does a pronunciation dictionary provide in a classic aligner?
   • The recording’s sample rate
   • The final timestamps for every word
   • A mapping from written words to expected phone sequences
   • A translation for each language
4. What search method does the classic Kaldi-based Montreal Forced Aligner use to find a likely sequence through speech?
   • Bubble sort over word strings
   • Randomly selecting timestamps
   • Linear regression on sentence length
   • Viterbi decoding over an HMM-based acoustic model
5. In WhisperX, what helps handle long-form audio before word-level forced alignment?
   • Voice-activity segmentation into speech chunks
   • Deleting the supplied transcript
   • Changing every word into a phoneme by hand
   • Skipping audio and estimating timestamps from punctuation
6. Which task can use the word boundaries produced by an aligner?
   • Determining the speaker’s identity with certainty
   • Synchronizing captions or karaoke text to speech
   • Translating speech without a transcript
   • Removing every background sound
7. Can forced alignment establish that the supplied transcript is factually correct?
   • Yes, it always corrects every transcript error
   • Only when the audio is stereo
   • No; it estimates timing for the provided text and does not verify the words
   • Yes, if a pronunciation dictionary is supplied
8. What can happen when a word is missing from an aligner’s pronunciation dictionary?
   • The audio automatically becomes translated
   • All following timestamps become legally certified
   • The word is guaranteed to align correctly without a model
   • The tool may need a pronunciation entry or a supported unknown-word strategy