Arabic Speaker-Independent Continuous Automatic Speech Recognition Based on a Phonetically Rich and Balanced Speech Corpus

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 but 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

Arabic Continuous Speech Recognition System using Sphinx-4

Speech is the most natural form of human communication and speech processing has been one of the most exciting areas of the signal processing. Speech recognition technology has made it possible for computer to follow human voice commands and understand human languages. The main goal of speech recognition area is to develop techniques and systems for speech input to machine and treat this speech to be used in many applications. As Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Statistics show that it is the first language (mother-tongue) of 206 million native speakers ranked as fourth after Mandarin, Spanish and English. In spite of its importance, research effort on Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is unfortunately still inadequate[7]. This thesis proposes and describes an efficient and effective framework for designing and developing a speaker-independent continuous automatic Arabic speech recognition system based on a phonetically rich and balanced speech corpus. The developing Arabic speech recognition system is based on the Carnegie Mellon university Sphinx tools. To build the system, we develop three basic components. The dictionary which contains all possible phonetic pronunciations of any word in the domain vocabulary. The second one is the language model such a model tries to capture the properties of a sequence of words by means of a probability distribution, and to predict the next word in a speech sequence. The last one is the acoustic model which will be created by taking audio recordings of speech, and their text transcriptions, and using software to create statistical representations of the sounds that make up each word. The system use the rich and balanced database that contains 367 sentences, a total of 14232 words. The phonetic dictionary contains about 23,841 definitions corresponding to the database words. And the language model contains14233 mono-gram and 32813 bi-grams and 37771 tri-grams. The engine uses 3-emmiting states Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for tri-phone-based acoustic models

A method for the extraction of phonetically-rich triphone sentences

A method is proposed for compiling a corpus of phonetically-rich triphone sentences; i.e., sentences with a high variety of triphones, distributed in a uniform fashion. Such a corpus is of interest for a wide range of contexts, from automatic speech recognition to speech therapy. We evaluated this method by building phonetically-rich corpora for Brazilian Portuguese. The data employed comes from Wikipedia’s dumps, which were converted into plain text, segmented and phonetically transcribed. The method consists of comparing the distance between the triphone distribution of the available sentences to na ideal uniform distribution, with equiprobable triphones. A greedy algorithm was implemented to recognize and evaluate the distance among sentences. A heuristic metric is proposed for pre-selecting sentences for the algorithm, in order to quicken its execution. The results show that, by applying the proposed metric, one can build corpora with more uniform triphone distributions

Towards using CMU Sphinx Tools for the Holy Quran recitation verification

The use of the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology is being used is many different applications that help simplify the interaction with a wider range of devices. This paper investigates the use of a simplified set of phonemes in an ASR system applied to Holy Quran. The Carnegie Mellon University Sphinx 4 tools were used to train and evaluate an acoustic model on Holy Quran recitations that are widely available online. The building of the acoustic model was done using a simplified list of phonemes instead of the mainly used Romanized in order to simplify the process of training the acoustic model. In this paper, the experiment resulted in Word Error Rates (WER) as low as 1.5% even with a very small set of audio files to use in the training phase

A comparison of grapheme and phoneme-based units for Spanish spoken term detection

The ever-increasing volume of audio data available online through the world wide web means that automatic methods for indexing and search are becoming essential. Hidden Markov model (HMM) keyword spotting and lattice search techniques are the two most common approaches used by such systems. In keyword spotting, models or templates are defined for each search term prior to accessing the speech and used to find matches. Lattice search (referred to as spoken term detection), uses a pre-indexing of speech data in terms of word or sub-word units, which can then quickly be searched for arbitrary terms without referring to the original audio. In both cases, the search term can be modelled in terms of sub-word units, typically phonemes. For in-vocabulary words (i.e. words that appear in the pronunciation dictionary), the letter-to-sound conversion systems are accepted to work well. However, for out-of-vocabulary (OOV) search terms, letter-to-sound conversion must be used to generate a pronunciation for the search term. This is usually a hard decision (i.e. not probabilistic and with no possibility of backtracking), and errors introduced at this step are difficult to recover from. We therefore propose the direct use of graphemes (i.e., letter-based sub-word units) for acoustic modelling. This is expected to work particularly well in languages such as Spanish, where despite the letter-to-sound mapping being very regular, the correspondence is not one-to-one, and there will be benefits from avoiding hard decisions at early stages of processing. In this article, we compare three approaches for Spanish keyword spotting or spoken term detection, and within each of these we compare acoustic modelling based on phone and grapheme units. Experiments were performed using the Spanish geographical-domain Albayzin corpus. Results achieved in the two approaches proposed for spoken term detection show us that trigrapheme units for acoustic modelling match or exceed the performance of phone-based acoustic models. In the method proposed for keyword spotting, the results achieved with each acoustic model are very similar

Speech Recognition of Isolated Arabic words via using Wavelet Transformation and Fuzzy Neural Network

In this paper two new methods for feature extraction are presented for speech recognition the first method use a combination of  linear predictive coding technique(LPC) and skewness equation. The second one(WLPCC) use a combination of linear predictive coding technique(LPC),  discrete wavelet transform(DWT), and cpestrum analysis. The objective of this method is to enhance the performance of the proposed method by introducing more features from the signal. Neural Network(NN) and Neuro-Fuzzy Network are used in the proposed methods for classification. Test result show that the WLPCC method in the process of features extraction, and the neuro fuzzy network in the classification process had highest recognition rate for both the trained and non trained data. The proposed system has been built using MATLAB software and the data involve ten isolated Arabic words that are (الله، محمد، خديجة، ياسين، يتكلم، الشارقة، لندن، يسار، يمين، أحزان), for fifteen male speakers. The recognition rate of trained data is (97.8%) and non-trained data  is (81.1%). Keywords: Speech Recognition, Feature Extraction, Linear Predictive Coding (LPC),Neural Network, Fuzzy networ