NDLI: What we have and what is needed, how to evaluate Arabic Speech Synthesizer?

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Note from the Editor : Special issue on Arabic Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition: a study of algorithms, resources, tools, techniques, and commercial applications

Note from the Guest Editors: Special issue on Arabic Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition: A study of algorithms, resources, tools, techniques, and commercial applications

Towards an automatic extraction of synonyms for Quranic Arabic WordNet

A frame-based approach for capturing semantics from Arabic text for text-to-sign language MT

Semantic indexing of Arabic texts for information retrieval system

ViStA: a visualization system for exploring Arabic text

Time-sensitive Arabic multiword expressions extraction from social networks

Improving Arabic morphological analyzers benchmark

Impact of morphological analysis and a large training corpus on the performances of Arabic diacritization

AMPN: a semantic resource for Arabic morphological patterns

A hybrid Arabic POS tagging for simple and compound morphosyntactic tags

Bidirectional HMM-based Arabic POS tagging

Parsing Arabic using induced probabilistic context free grammar

Towards an open platform based on HPSG formalism for the standard Arabic language

A new Quranic Corpus rich in morphosyntactical information

Comparative evaluation of tools for Arabic corpora search and analysis

WIT: Weka interface translator

Usefulness, localizability, humanness, and language-benefit: additional evaluation criteria for natural language dialogue systems

Production of referring expressions in Arabic

Acoustic echo cancellation using adaptive filtering algorithms for Quranic accents (Qiraat) identification

Speaker identification based on state space model

What we have and what is needed, how to evaluate Arabic Speech Synthesizer?

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 19, Issue 1, March 2016

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 18

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 17

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 16

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 15

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 14

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 13

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 12

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 11

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 10

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 9

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 8

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 7

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 6

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 5

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 4

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 3

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 2

International Journal of Speech Technology : Volume 1

What we have and what is needed, how to evaluate Arabic Speech Synthesizer?

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Abu Doush, Iyad Alkhatib, Faisal Bsoul, Abed Al Raoof
Copyright Year	2016
Abstract	Arabic language is one of six United Nations official languages. Arabic language processing, in particular speech synthesis, is a challenging task due to the inherent complexity of the language text and characters and because each letter may have up to seven different sounds. In this paper, we provide subjective and objective evaluation for six different speech synthesizer applications available on the Internet for Arabic language namely: Acapela, ISpeech, Arabi, Sakhr, Google, and Nuance. In the case of subjective evaluation the authors performed four intelligibility tests: Diagnostic Rhyme, Modified Rhyme, Phonetically Confusable Sentences. The fourth test is proposed by the authors, Automatic Diacritization Intelligibility (ADI) which is used to test the intelligibility of the speech engine in predicting the diacritization mark according to the word context in the statement. Another two tests were performed to evaluate other features of the speech engines are: first, Arabic Text with All Sounds (ATAS) test which is used to evaluate different features when the speech engine reads Arabic text that contains all sounds for different Arabic letters. Second, Best/Worst Pleasant Voice this test is proposed by the authors to determine the best and worst speech engine in terms of the voice pleasantness. The other type of evaluation conducted is objective evaluation we evaluate the output of the six systems objectively and compare the results with the subjective evaluations performed. Such comparison is achieved by computing some objective metrics from the signals of both the generated sound by the systems and a reference one (i.e., the same text is spoken by a human). Two types of measurements are used as the objective metrics; signal to noise variation (segmented SNR) and a linear predictive (LP-based) measure. The originality of the evaluation is that it is based on using an Arabic text (diacritized and non-diacritized) containing all sounds of Arabic letters. Another novelty is that we introduced two tests ADI and ATAS tests for Arabic speech synthesizers evaluation. The result from subject users are provided to measure clearness/naturalness, speed, sound quality, pronunciation, clearness, stress/intonation, pronunciation errors, intelligibility, and pleasantness. In addition, results from experts are presented to measure the articulation of each sound, number of not pronounced words, and the speed of reading. The obtained results reveal the need to have speech synthesizers for Arabic language that considers diacritization to enhance the performance of the system. It points also to the importance of having an accurate automatic diacritization system that generates a diacritized text to be synthesized. The results show the significance of having a human similar voice for the speech synthesizer. We proposed a set of recommendations for improving Arabic speech synthesizers.
Starting Page	415
Ending Page	432
Page Count	18
File Format	PDF
ISSN	13812416
Journal	International Journal of Speech Technology
Volume Number	19
Issue Number	2
e-ISSN	15728110
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2016-04-06
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Arabic Speech Synthesizers Phonetically confusable sentences test Intelligibility test Diacritized and non-diacritized Arabic text Speech evaluation Objective speech evaluation Subjective evaluation Signal, Image and Speech Processing Social Sciences Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics)
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Human-Computer Interaction Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Software Linguistics and Language

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3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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What we have and what is needed, how to evaluate Arabic Speech Synthesizer?

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