Contributing Authors of Aligner

Stefan Rapp
Franck Giron
Antje Schweitzer
Ugo di Profio
Daniela Raddino
Markus Fach
and numerous students and researchers at IMS Stuttgart.

Aliger needs HTK to do the actual Alignment. See 
http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk for contributors.

For English grapheme to phoneme conversion, weka is used and a jar 
file of weka is included. See http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka
for contributors.

Development history

The initial version of the Aligner, covering only German was written
by Stefan Rapp while working at the Institute of Natural Language
Processing /Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (IMS) at the
University of Stuttgart, Germany from 1995 to 1996. Prof. Dr. Grzegorz
Dogil is acknowledged for supporting and guiding the research and
giving the university's consent to release the Aligner under GPL.

It was subsequently extended by Franck Giron with minor contributions
by Stefan Rapp for French, and by Ugo di Profio, Daniela Raddino and
again some minor contributions by Stefan Rapp for Italian while
working at Sony International (Europe) GmbH, Stuttgart. Franck also 
devised the structure for maintaining the code for the various languages 
and thus made the basis for a homogeneous multilingual environment.
Thomas Kemp and Markus Zumkeller are acknowledged for giving consent to
Sony's employees to contribute to the Aligner under the GPL.

Antje Schweitzer and to some extend Markus Fach maintained the
Installation at IMS-Stuttgart. Antje provided numerous bug fixes and
contributed to and extended the code substantially throughout the
lifetime of the project. She also prepared releases of the package
together with Stefan.

The Aligner was extended to English during a speech recognition
seminar at IMS with the help of several computer linguistics students
and researchers of the institute.

The current maintainer of Aligner is Stefan Rapp.
You can reach Stefan as follows:

Dr. Stefan Rapp
Uhlandstr. 10
78559 Gosheim
GERMANY

+49-7426-933883

rapp@conante.com