kaldialign

A small package that exposes edit distance computation functions from Kaldi. It uses the original Kaldi code and wraps it using Cython.

Examples

• align(seq1, seq2, epsilon) - used to obtain the alignment between two string sequences. epsilon should be a null symbol (indicating deletion/insertion) that doesn't exist in either sequence.

from kaldialign import align

EPS = '*'
a = ['a', 'b', 'c']
b = ['a', 's', 'x', 'c']
ali = align(a, b, EPS)
assert ali == [('a', 'a'), (EPS, 's'), ('b', 'x'), ('c', 'c')]

• edit_distance(seq1, seq2) - used to obtain the total edit distance, as well as the number of insertions, deletions and substitutions.

from kaldialign import edit_distance

a = ['a', 'b', 'c']
b = ['a', 's', 'x', 'c']
results = edit_distance(a, b)
assert results == {
    'ins': 1,
    'del': 0,
    'sub': 1,
    'total': 2
}

Motivation

The need for this arised from the fact that practically all implementations of the Levenshtein distance have slight differences, making it impossible to use a different scoring tool than Kaldi and get the same error rate results. This package copies code from Kaldi directly and wraps it using Cython, avoiding the issue altogether.