Novel approaches to Arabic speech recognition: report from the 2002 Johns-Hopkins Summer Workshop

Author

Kirchhoff, Katrin ; Bilmes, Jeff ; Das, Sourin ; Duta, Nicolae ; Egan, Melissa ; Ji, Gang ; He, Feng ; Henderson, John ; Liu, Daben ; Noamany, M. ; Schone, Pat ; Schwartz, Richard ; Vergyri, Dimitra

Author_Institution

Washington Univ., St. Louis, MO, USA

Volume

1

fYear

2003

fDate

6-10 April 2003

Abstract

Although Arabic is currently one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, there has been relatively little speech recognition research on Arabic compared to other languages. Moreover, most previous work has concentrated on the recognition of formal rather than dialectal Arabic. This paper reports on our project at the 2002 Johns Hopkins Summer Workshop, which focused on the recognition of dialectal Arabic. Three problems were addressed: (a) the lack of short vowels and other pronunciation information in Arabic texts; (b) the morphological complexity of Arabic; and (c) the discrepancies between dialectal and formal Arabic. We present novel approaches to automatic vowel restoration, morphology-based language modeling and the integration of out-of-corpus language model data, and report significant word error rate improvements on the LDC Arabic CallHome task.

Keywords

natural languages; speech recognition; Arabic speech recognition; Johns-Hopkins Summer Workshop; LDC Arabic CallHome task; automatic vowel restoration; dialectal Arabic; dialectal Arabic recognition; formal Arabic; morphological complexity; morphology-based language modeling; out-of-corpus language model data; pronunciation information; speech recognition research; vowels; word error rate;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings. (ICASSP '03). 2003 IEEE International Conference on

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7663-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.2003.1198788

Filename

1198788