An enhanced automatic speech recognition system for Arabic

Mohamed Amine Menacer, Odile Mella, Dominique Fohr, Denis Jouvet, David Langlois, Kamel Smaili

Abstract
Automatic speech recognition for Arabic is a very challenging task. Despite all the classical techniques for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which can be efficiently applied to Arabic speech recognition, it is essential to take into consideration the language specificities to improve the system performance. In this article, we focus on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) speech recognition. We introduce the challenges related to Arabic language, namely the complex morphology nature of the language and the absence of the short vowels in written text, which leads to several potential vowelization for each graphemes, which is often conflicting. We develop an ASR system for MSA by using Kaldi toolkit. Several acoustic and language models are trained. We obtain a Word Error Rate (WER) of 14.42 for the baseline system and 12.2 relative improvement by rescoring the lattice and by rewriting the output with the right Z hamoza above or below Alif.
Anthology ID:
W17-1319
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Nizar Habash, Mona Diab, Kareem Darwish, Wassim El-Hajj, Hend Al-Khalifa, Houda Bouamor, Nadi Tomeh, Mahmoud El-Haj, Wajdi Zaghouani
Venue:
WANLP
SIG:
SEMITIC
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
157–165
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1319
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-1319
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohamed Amine Menacer, Odile Mella, Dominique Fohr, Denis Jouvet, David Langlois, and Kamel Smaili. 2017. An enhanced automatic speech recognition system for Arabic. In Proceedings of the Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 157–165, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An enhanced automatic speech recognition system for Arabic (Menacer et al., WANLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/W17-1319.pdf
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