Arabic speech recognition using SPHINX engine

Abstract

Although the Arab world has an estimated number of 250 million Arabic speakers, there has been little research on Arabic speech recognition when compared to other languages of similar importance (e.g. Mandarin). Due to the lack of diacritic Arabic text and the lack of Pronunciation Dictionary (PD), most of previous work on Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition has been concentrated on developing recognizers using Romanized characters i.e. let the system recognizes the Arabic word as an English one, then map it to Arabic word from lookup table that maps the Arabic word to its Romanized pronunciation.