Model Card for french_mfa
This MFA model is for aligning French speech.
Model Details
Model Description
- Developed by: Michael McAuliffe
- Funded by: N/A
- Model type: Montreal Forced Aligner model
- Language(s) (NLP): French
- License: cc-by-4.0
Uses
Direct Use
This model is intended to be used for forced alignment of French speech. Please see https://montreal-forced-aligner.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/troubleshooting.html for details on common fixes.
Out-of-Scope Use
This model cannot provide accurate assessments of goodness of pronunciations or provide transcripts as it is trained to be accepting of variation in pronunciation to provide a reasonable alignment for French speech.
Bias, Risks, and Limitations
This model will perform best on the variety of speech that it was trained on. The speakers in the training data are all adult speakers, so child speech alignment may not be accurate.
Recommendations
When using this model on a variety that it was not trained on, better results can be attained by adapting the model to the data to be aligned first. See https://montreal-forced-aligner.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/workflows/adapt_acoustic_model.html and https://github.com/mmcauliffe/mfa-adaptation for example usage and scripts.
How to Get Started with the Model
Use the code below to get started with the model.
To get started, follow the instructions for installing MFA. To align files using this model, use the mfa align command.
Dictionary Details
Details for french_mfa dictionary and G2P model
- Source: wikipron
- Orthography: Latin
- Phone set: MFA
- Words: 369,474
- Phones: 43
- Graphemes: 313
IPA chart
Consonants
| Manner | Labial | Labiodental | Alveolar | Alveopalatal | Palatal | Velar | Uvular |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | |||
| Palatalized | mʲ | ||||||
| Stop | p b | t d | c ɟ | k ɡ | |||
| Affricate | ts | tʃ dʒ | |||||
| Sibilant | s z | ʃ ʒ | |||||
| Fricative | f v | ʁ | |||||
| Approximant | w | j ɥ | |||||
| Lateral | l | ʎ |
Vowels
Oral vowels
| Front | Near-Front | Central | Near-Back | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i y | u | |||
| Close-Mid | e ø | o | |||
| ə | |||||
| Open-Mid | ɛ œ | ɔ | |||
| Open | a | ɑ |
Nasal vowels
| Front | Near-Front | Central | Near-Back | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | |||||
| Close-Mid | |||||
| Open-Mid | ɛ̃ | ɔ̃ | |||
| Open | ɑ̃ |
Training Details
Training Data
African-accented French
- Source: http://www.openslr.org/57/
- License: Apache 2.0
- Dialects: N/A
- Number of hours: 19.93
- Number of utterances: 16,656
- Number of speakers: 233
- Female speakers: 0
- Male speakers: 0
- Unknown speakers: 233
Common Voice French
- Source: https://voice.mozilla.org/en/datasets
- License: CC-0
- Dialects: N/A
- Number of hours: 963.62
- Number of utterances: 697,672
- Number of speakers: 17,312
- Female speakers: 814
- Male speakers: 3,323
- Unknown speakers: 13,175
GlobalPhone French
- Source: https://catalogue.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0197/
- License: ELRA
- Dialects: N/A
- Number of hours: 26.95
- Number of utterances: 10,476
- Number of speakers: 100
- Female speakers: 51
- Male speakers: 49
- Unknown speakers: 0
Training Procedure
Preprocessing
Preprocessing include fixes and orthographic standardization to various corpora.
Training Hyperparameters
- Training regime: Training configuration
Evaluation
Testing Data, Factors & Metrics
Testing Data
N/A
Factors
N/A
Metrics
N/A
Results
N/A
Summary
Technical Specifications
Model Architecture and Objective
HMM-GMM model
Software
This model was trained via the Montreal Forced Aligner.
Citation
BibTeX:
@techreport{mfa_french_mfa_acoustic_2026,
author={McAuliffe, Michael and Sonderegger, Morgan},
title={French MFA acoustic model v3.3.0},
address={\url{https://huggingface.co/MontrealCorpusTools/french_mfa}},
year={2026},
month={Jun},
}
APA:
McAuliffe, M. & Sonderegger, M. (2026). French MFA acoustic model v3.3.0. Available at https://huggingface.co/MontrealCorpusTools/french_mfa.
Contact
For questions and issues, please file an issue either for this model at https://huggingface.co/MontrealCorpusTools/french_mfa/discussions or for larger MFA issues at https://github.com/MontrealCorpusTools/Montreal-Forced-Aligner/issues.