make sure any empty segments are removed (NVIDIA-NeMo#7155)

Signed-off-by: Elena Rastorgueva <[email protected]>

Author: erastorgueva-nv

tools/nemo_forced_aligner/utils/data_prep.py

@@ -249,6 +249,8 @@ def get_utt_obj(
 
     # remove any spaces at start and end of segments
     segments = [seg.strip() for seg in segments]
+    # remove any empty segments
+    segments = [seg for seg in segments if len(seg) > 0]
 
     utt = Utterance(text=text, audio_filepath=audio_filepath, utt_id=utt_id,)