Title
Arabic Speaker-Independent Continuous Automatic Speech Recognition Based On A Phonetically Rich And Balanced Speech Corpus
Abstract
This paper describes and proposes an efficient and effective framework for the design and development of a speaker-independent continuous automatic Arabic speech recognition system based on a phonetically rich and balanced speech corpus. The speech corpus contains a total of 415 sentences recorded by 40 (20 male and 20 female) Arabic native speakers from 11 different Arab countries representing the three major regions (Levant, Gulf and Africa) in the Arab world. The proposed Arabic speech recognition system is based on the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Sphinx tools, and the Cambridge HTK tools were also used at some testing stages. The speech engine uses 3-emitting state Hidden Markov Models (HMM) for tri-phone based acoustic models. Based on experimental analysis of about 7 hours of training speech data, the acoustic model is best using continuous observation's probability model of 16 Gaussian mixture distributions and the state distributions were tied to 500 senones. The language model contains both bi-grams and tri-grams. For similar speakers with different sentences, the system obtained a word recognition accuracy of 92.67% and 93.88% and a Word Error Rate (WER) of 11.27% and 10.07% with and without diacritical marks, respectively. For different speakers with similar sentences, the system obtained a word recognition accuracy of 95.92% and 96.29%, and a WER of 5.78%, and 5.45% with and without diacritical marks, respectively. Whereas different speakers and different sentences, the system obtained a word recognition accuracy of 89.08% and 90.23%, and a WER of 15.59% and 14.44% with and without diacritical marks, respectively.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2012
INTERNATIONAL ARAB JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Arabic automatic speech recognition, arabic speech corpus, phonetically rich and balanced, acoustic model, statistical language model
Field
DocType
Volume
Speech corpus,Probability model,Arabic,Computer science,Word recognition,Word error rate,Speech recognition,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Hidden Markov model,Language model,Acoustic model
Journal
9
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1683-3198
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.70
9
5