Correction of pathological speeches and assistance to learners with vocal disabilities

Abstract

This work describes a new methodology for correcting voice defects contained in the Arabic speeches and assisting learners of Arabic vocabulary. For this purpose, we follow four stages. The first step consists in localizing the vocal disabilities which degrade an Arabic voice signal, so we focus on comparing between a referenced probabilistic-phonetic model and a speaker model. Second, we differentiate two cases: Degraded speeches can be generated from pathological problems, or it can be produced by non arabophone learners. Hence, we compare between forced alignment scores. Third, we develop a new algorithm to correct pathological pronunciations. The last task is the conception of an application assisting learners of Arabic vocabulary in improving their pronunciation. The achieved results are encouraging. Moreover, learners of Arabic vocabulary have presented a good amelioration using the developed application. A lot of applications that design systems of voice signal processing can use our proposition.