Montreal Forced Aligner and the state of speech-to-text alignment in 2026
The Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) was released in 2016 and has since become the most widely used tool for forced alignment in research and industry. In the decade since, MFA has undergone substantial development, including expanded coverage across more languages and dialects using larger open-source datasets, harmonized IPA dictionaries, model adaptation, cross-language phone remapping, and support utilities. This paper documents MFA 3.0's developments since version 1.0 and evaluates MFA's performance across English, Japanese, and Korean, benchmarked against classic and neural forced aligners. MFA 3.0 achieves state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art performance across all four benchmark...
| Authors | Michael McAuliffe, Kaylynn Gunter, Michael Wagner et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 June 2026 |
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