pykaldi

Wrapping KALDI http://sourceforge.net/projects/kaldi/ into python functions.

WHY

• Most of the code I have is written in Python, and I have many scripts which alternate between executing Kaldi commands and parsing the generated files.

• Many toolkits are written in Python, and I would like to make then interact with Kaldi directly.

• I also wanted to learn C++ and Boost Python, and since I use Kaldi and I know Python, it may be an useful thing to do... (so do not expect high quality C++ code for now...)

WARNING

• To many aspects, it does not follow the philosophy of the Kaldi project.

• This code merely attempts to use some of the Kaldi functionalities, so you loose many cool aspects of Kaldi executable files, such as the possibility to pipe Kaldi command, amongst other things...

• This is not an attempt to export the whole Kaldi in Python, but only (some) of the executables : most of the code is a copy-paste of the code in *bin/ folders of Kaldi sources, with a few adaptations.

• The proposed solutions are probably a lot slower, memory-consuming, etc. than Kaldi is.

• So far, I did not perform any test beyond very basic ones...

• I will develop features as I need them, and since I do not work on speech recognition, I will probably skip a lot of things

• So far, I only developed a Python version of the decode-faster-mapped program from Kaldi

• Compilation tested with KALDI at revision 1960

INSTALLATION

• You must have a compiled version of KALDI somewhere

• Modify the Makefile and change the paths at the beginning of the file

• Note : maybe there are more things in the Makefile than needed, but it worked like this...

• Add the path to the folder containing the libkaldi.so and pykaldi2.so to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and to the PYTHONPATH

• Into tests folder, run python testdecoder.py (note : not yet a nose-test...)

IMPLEMENTED

• Equivalent of gmm-decode-faster and decode-faster-mapped, with separation between initialization of decoder (reading transition model, FST, and so on) and decoding of one utterance.
  • Usage examples in tests/testdecoder.py and pykaldi/decoder/fasterdecoder.py

TODO

• Cleaner Makefile
• Tests
• Clean code - and add licence in files
• Add functionalities
• Add python code examples