The Building and Evaluation of a Mobile Parallel Multi-Dialect Speech Corpus for Arabic

This paper discusses the process of building and evaluation a mobile parallel multi-dialect speech corpus for Arabic. The methodology for implementing the experiment is as follows: Two SIM cards were installed in two mobiles phones. One party is the sender and the other the receiver. Four different environments were chosen for the receiver, i.e. inside the home, in a moving car, in a public place and in a quiet place. By the end of the experiment, a new mobile parallel speech corpus for Arabic dialects was built. The newly obtained corpus provides us with the benefits of a large, fully parallel and labelled speech corpus without the necessity of a big effort for collection and building. The resultant corpus will be made freely available to researchers. To evaluate the resultant corpus, the CMU Sphinx recogniser extracted the word error rates (WERs) 24.3, 17.9, 31.2, 18.7 and 32.0 for multi-dialect, Levantine, Gulf, MSA and Egyptian, respectively.