Generation of arabic phonetic dictionaries for speech recognition

Abstract

Phonetic dictionaries are essential components of large-vocabulary natural language speakerindependent speech recognition systems. This paper presents a rule-based technique to generate Arabic phonetic dictionaries for a large vocabulary speech recognition system. The system used classic Arabic pronunciation rules, common pronunciation rules of Modern Standard Arabic, as well as morphologically driven rules. The paper gives in detail an explanation of these rules as well as their formal mathematical presentation. The rules were used to generate a dictionary for a 5.4 hours corpus of broadcast news. The phonetic dictionary contains 23,841 definitions corresponding to about 14232 words. The generated dictionary was evaluated on an actual Arabic speech recognition system. The pronunciation rules and the phone set were validated by test cases. The Arabic speech recognition system achieves word error rate of %11.71 for fully diacritized transcription of about 1.1 hours of Arabic broadcast news.

Modern standard Arabic speech corpus for implementing and evaluating automatic continuous speech recognition systems

“…A detailed description of the development of this Arabic phonetic dictionary can be found in Ref. [11]. Arabic pronunciation follows certain rules and patterns when the text is fully diacritized.…”

Towards Quranic reader controlled by speech

“…The Sphinx framework was originally designed for English, but nowadays it supports also, among others, Spanish, French and Mandarin. However, there are limited acoustic model available for Arabic [4,5,6].…”

Arabic broadcast news transcription system

“…This work uses mainly a rule-based technique to generate Arabic phonetic dictionaries for a large vocabulary speech recognition system. In Ali et al (2008) the authors presented a rule-based approach to generate Arabic phonetic dictionaries for a large vocabulary speech recognition system. The system used classic Arabic pronunciation rules, common pronunciation rules of Modern Standard Arabic, as well as morphologically driven rules.…”