1. King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
1/18/2019
West Point, SAAVB, and BBN/AUB Arabic Speech Corpora: A Comparative Survey
Yousef A. Alotaibi
Ali H. Meftah
King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
This work is supported by NPST project No. 10-INF
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

2. OUTLINE INTRODUCTION SPEECH CORPORA BACKGROUND EVALUATION CONCLUSION
MSA Arabic
Arabic Dialects
SPEECH CORPORA BACKGROUND
(TIMIT, WESTPOINT, SAAVB, and BBN/AUB)
EVALUATION
Type, Speakers, Data Source, Labelling, Training and Testing
CONCLUSION
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

3. INTRODUCTION MSA Arabic 34 Phonemes (6 V + 28 C)
Valid syllables: CV, CVV, CVC, CVCC, CVVC, and CVVCC
Limited number of research
Low in quality of Arabic language resources
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

4. INTRODUCTION Arabic Dialects
The Arab world can be divided into many different ways. The following is only one of many that cover the main Arabic dialects:
Gulf Arabic
Levantine Arabic
Egyptian Arabic
Maghreb Arabic
Yemenite
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

5. SPEECH CORPORA BACKGROUND
TIMIT
American English speakers of different genders and dialects
A read (Canonical) speech corpus
Contains a total of 6,300 sentences, 10 sentences (about 30 sec of speech)
Spoken by each of 630 speakers (438 males that account for a percentage of 70%, and 192 females
8 major dialect regions of the United States (US)
A speaker's dialect region is a geographical distribution within the U.S. mainland. Those speakers lived during their childhood years in the same area
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

6. SPEECH CORPORA BACKGROUND
West Point
Represent MSA Arabic language
Produced by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)
A read corpus
Contain 110 speakers (66 male, 44 female)
Consists of collections of 4 main Arabic scripts which contain 258 sentences and it has a total of 1512 tokens and 991types. The total number of distinct Arabic words is It consists of 8,516 speech files, totaling 1.7 gigabytes or hours of speech data
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

7. SPEECH CORPORA BACKGROUND
SAAVB Corpus
Saudi Arabia dialect
A telephony and noisy speech corpus
Collected by KACST during 2002 to 2003
A Canonical and spontaneous speech corpus
Acquired from 1,033 speakers (51% males and 49% females)
Total duration recorded is hours distributed among audio files (1033 speakers x 59 audio files)
Size is 2.59 GB. It contains 1,033 directories with 183,518 files
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

8. SPEECH CORPORA BACKGROUND
BBN/AUB Corpus
Levantine dialect
Developed by funding from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)
A set of spontaneous speech sentences
Recorded in Boston (20%), and in American University of Beirut (AUB) (80%)
Consists of 164 speakers, 101 males and 63 females
Total duration recorded speech is 45 hours distributed among 75,900 audio, the total audio size: 6.5 GB. The total text size is 3.1 MB, Vocabulary is 15K words and Total words are 336K words
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

9. EVALUATION Corpus Type Corpus TIMIT W.P SAAVB BBN/AUB TYPE Canonical +
Spontaneously
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

10. Speakers Number of speakers
EVALUATION
Speakers
Number of speakers
Corpus
TIMIT
W.P
SAAVB
BBN/AUB
NO. of Speakers
630
110
1033
164
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

11. EVALUATION Speakers Gender
Very clear in (TIMIT, SAAVB, and West Point) and implicitly reported in BBN/AUB
Corpus
TIMIT
West Point
SAAVB
BBN/AUB
Male
438
(70%) 66
(60%)
523
(50.63%)
101
(61.58%)
Female
192
(30%) 44
(40%)
510
(49.37%) 63
(38.41%)
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

12. EVALUATION Speakers Speakers’ Ages
TIMIT, West Point, and BBN/AUB corpora unfortunately no reference to this was reported in their Catalogs and does not give information about the speakers’ ages
In SAAVB corpus, the ages are distributed and documented for each speaker in a well-defined manner
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

13. EVALUATION Speakers Speakers Nationalities
BBN/AUB corpus does not refer to this important information, thy only refer to 20% of the corpus was recorded in Boston and the remaining 80% was recorded in AUB
Corpus
TIMIT
West Point
SAAVB
BBN/AUB
Native
100%
68.18% ?
Nonnative -
31.81%
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

14. EVALUATION
Speakers
Speakers distribution within investigated region of the targeted dialects
West point and BBN/AUB not shown how they chose the group of speakers form the Arabic countries(22 country for W.P, and 4 countries for BBN/AUB)
Corpus
TIMIT
West Point
SAAVB
BBN/AUB
Distribution state
8 Regions ?
ALL Saudi Cities.
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

15. EVALUATION Data Sources Corpus TIMIT West Point SAAVB BBN/AUB
Sampling Rate
16KHz
22.05KHz
8KHz
Recorded By
Soundproof chamber
Shure SM10A microphone and a RANE Model MS1 pre-amplifier
Telephone system
Close-talking, noise-cancelling, headset microphone
(the Andrea Electronics NC-65)
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

16. Lexicon and Labeling West Point is timeless
EVALUATION
Lexicon and Labeling
West Point is timeless
Corpus
TIMIT
West Point
SAAVB
BBN/AUB
Labeling
Yes No
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

17. EVALUATION Training and Testing Subsets
TIMIT has been subdivided into suggested training and testing subsets using the following criteria:
Roughly 20% to 30% of the corpus should be used for testing purposes, leaving the remaining 70% to 80% for training
No speaker should appear in both subsets.
All the dialect regions should be represented in both subsets
Overlap of text material in the two subsets should be minimized; if possible no texts should be identical
All the phonemes should be covered in the test material
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

18. Training and Testing Subsets
EVALUATION
Training and Testing Subsets
SAAVB left it open for researchers and application developers to select the training and testing sets according to their need
West Point and BBN/AUB do not refer to that
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

19. CONCLUSION Arabic language lacks reliable speech corpora
Robust Arabic speech corpora must be consider:
The different Arab countries
The different Arab and dialects
The different speakers' ages, genders and good distributions
Training and testing subsets are too important additionally to the phonemes labelling
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

20. Thank you for Your Attention
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco

21. Any Question?
1/18/2019
4th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, May 2–3, 2012, Rabat, Morocco