Arabic Speech Corpus
The corpus was recorded in south Levantine Arabic (Damascian accent) using a professional studio.
SOUTHAMPTON University
Modern Standard Arabic Speech Corpus

speech recognition
nan
Nawar Halabi,Gary B Wills
Corpus design for speech synthesis is a well-researched topic in languages such as English
compared to Modern Standard Arabic, and there is a tendency to focus on methods to automatically
generate the orthographic transcript to be recorded (usually greedy methods), which was used in
this work. In this work, a study of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) phonetics and phonology is
conducted in order to develop criteria for a greedy method to create a MSA speech corpus
transcript for recording. The size of the dataset is reduced a number of times using optimisation
methods with different parameters to yield a much smaller dataset with the identical phonetic
coverage offered before the reduction. The resulting output transcript is then chosen for recording.
A phoneme set and a phonotactic rule-set are created for automatically generating a phonetic
transcript of normalised MSA text which is used to annotate and segment the speech corpus after
recording, achieving 82.5% boundary precision with some manual alignments (~15% of the
corpus) to increase the precision of the automatic alignment. This is part of a larger work to create
a completely annotated and segmented speech corpus for MSA speech synthesis with an evaluation
of the quality of this speech corpus and, where possible, the quality of each stage in the process.
