2009 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Improving the Arabic Pronunciation Dictionary for Phone and Word
Recognition with Linguistically-Based Pronunciation Rules

Biadsy, Fadi; Hirschberg, Julia Bell; Habash, Nizar Y.

In this paper, we show that linguistically motivated pronunciation rules can improve phone and word recognition results for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Using these rules and the MADA morphological analysis and disambiguation tool, multiple pronunciations per word are automatically generated to build two pronunciation dictionaries; one for training and another for decoding. We demonstrate that the use of these rules can significantly improve both MSA phone recognition and MSA word recognition accuracies over a baseline system using pronunciation rules typically employed in previous work on MSA Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We obtain a significant improvement in absolute accuracy in phone recognition of 3.77%–7.29% and a significant improvement of 4.1% in absolute accuracy in ASR.