Aswat: Arabic Audio Dataset for Automatic Speech Recognition Using Speech-Representation Learning

Lamya Alkanhal, Abeer Alessa, Elaf Almahmoud, Rana Alaqil


Abstract
Recent advancements in self-supervised speech-representation learning for automatic speech recognition (ASR) approaches have significantly improved the results on many benchmarks with low-cost data labeling. In this paper, we train two self-supervised frameworks for ASR, namely wav2vec, and data2vec, in which we conduct multiple experiments and analyze their results. Furthermore, we introduce Aswat dataset, which covers multiple genres and features speakers with vocal variety. Aswat contains 732 hours of clean Arabic speech that can be used in the pretraining task for learning latent speech representations, which results in achieving a lower word error rate (WER) in Arabic ASR. We report the baseline results and achieve state-of-the-art WERs of 11.7% and 10.3% on Common Voice (CV) and the second round of Multi-Genre Broadcast (MGB-2) respectively, as a result of including our dataset Aswat.
Anthology ID:
2023.arabicnlp-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore (Hybrid)
Editors:
Hassan Sawaf, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Wajdi Zaghouani, Walid Magdy, Ahmed Abdelali, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Nizar Habash, Salam Khalifa, Amr Keleg, Hatem Haddad, Imed Zitouni, Khalil Mrini, Rawan Almatham
Venues:
ArabicNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
120–127
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.10
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.arabicnlp-1.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lamya Alkanhal, Abeer Alessa, Elaf Almahmoud, and Rana Alaqil. 2023. Aswat: Arabic Audio Dataset for Automatic Speech Recognition Using Speech-Representation Learning. In Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023, pages 120–127, Singapore (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Aswat: Arabic Audio Dataset for Automatic Speech Recognition Using Speech-Representation Learning (Alkanhal et al., ArabicNLP-WS 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.10.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.10.mp4