Automatic diacritization of Arabic for acoustic modeling in speech recognition

Automatic recognition of Arabic dialectal speech is a challenging task because Arabic dialects are essentially spoken varieties. Only few dialectal resources are available to date; moreover, most available acoustic data collections are transcribed without diacritics. Such a transcription omits essential pronunciation information about a word, such as short vowels. In this paper we investigate various procedures that enable us to use such training data by automatically inserting the missing diacritics into the transcription. These procedures use acoustic information in combination with different levels of morphological and contextual constraints. We evaluate their performance against manually diacritized transcriptions. In addition, we demonstrate the effect of their accuracy on the recognition performance of acoustic models trained on automatically diacritized training data.