Generation of a phonetic transcription for modern standard Arabic: A knowledge-based model

This paper outlines a comprehensive system for automatically generating a phonetic transcription of a given Arabic text which closely matches the pronunciation of the speakers. The presented system is based on a set of (language-dependent) pronunciation rules that works on converting fully diacriticised Arabic text into the actual sounds, along with a lexicon for exceptional words. This is a two-phase process: one-to-one grapheme to phoneme conversion and then phoneme-to-allophone conversion using a set of “phonological rules”. Phonological rules operate on the phonemes and convert them to the actual sounds considering the neighbouring phones or the containing syllable or word. This system is developed for the purpose of delivering a robust Automatic Arabic Speech Recognition (AASR) system which is able to handle speech variation resulting from the mismatch between the text and the pronunciation. We anticipate that it could also be used for producing natural sounding speech from an Arabic text-to-speech (ATTS) system as well, but we have not extensively tested it in this application.