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Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 533))

Abstract

We present the first end-to-end recipe of Arabic speech recognition using lexicon free Connection Temporal Classification (CTC) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). The study describes in details the decisions made, step by step, in building Arabic system including transcription method, feature extraction, training process and decoding optimization. The results are compared with Hidden Markov Models (HMM), Gaussian mixture models (GMM), and tandem baseline in Arabic using the same data set. The corpus is Aljazeera broadcast and language model extracted from the Aljazeera corpus, web and twitter crawling using different n-grams. We measure both word error rate (WER) and character error rate (CER) for each n-gram order. The results achieved are very close to the baseline with some recommendations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.kaldi-asr.org/.

  2. 2.

    http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/.

  3. 3.

    http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/.

  4. 4.

    http://www.qamus.org/transliteration.htm.

  5. 5.

    http://www.qcri.com/.

  6. 6.

    https://kheafield.com/code/kenlm/.

  7. 7.

    http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/.

  8. 8.

    http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.08240.

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Acknowledgment

Many thanks for Luminous technology center (info@luminous-technologies.com) for having full access to server NVidia based setup. Special thanks for QCRI for proving Aljazeera corpus. We thank Ziang Xie, Standard University.

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Correspondence to Abdelrahman Ahmed .

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Ahmed, A., Hifny, Y., Shaalan, K., Toral, S. (2017). Lexicon Free Arabic Speech Recognition Recipe. In: Hassanien, A., Shaalan, K., Gaber, T., Azar, A., Tolba, M. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics 2016. AISI 2016. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 533. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48308-5_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48308-5_15

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