Maltese

The Maltese language, locally known as il-Malti, is the national language of the Maltese Islands, which are situated in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Malta is situated 96 km south of Sicily and 288 km away from the North African coast, specifically from Tunisia. The Maltese archipelago consists of three islands, Malta, Għawdex (Gozo) and Kemmuna (Comino), which together cover an area of 315.6 km2. Gibraltar, to the West, is 1,826 km away and Alexandria, to the East, 1,510 km away (Azzopardi : 1995, pp. 18-19). Note that, for convenience, from now the name of the main island, Malta, will be used to refer to the Maltese Archipelago. Together with English, Maltese is also the official language of the state. This means, among other things, that the authorities are obliged to publish legal and official documents, such as laws, in both languages.peer-reviewe

Maltese

The Maltese language, locally known as il-Malti, is the national language of the Maltese Islands, which are situated in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Malta is situated 96 km south of Sicily and 288 km away from the North African coast, specifically from Tunisia. The Maltese archipelago consists of three islands, Malta, Għawdex (Gozo) and Kemmuna (Comino), which together cover an area of 315.6 km2. Gibraltar, to the West, is 1,826 km away and Alexandria, to the East, 1,510 km away (Azzopardi : 1995, pp. 18-19). Note that, for convenience, from now the name of the main island, Malta, will be used to refer to the Maltese Archipelago. Together with English, Maltese is also the official language of the state. This means, among other things, that the authorities are obliged to publish legal and official documents, such as laws, in both languages.peer-reviewe

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