Transcription Scheme for Languages Employing the Arabic Script Motivated by Speech Processing Application

摘要

Abstract This paper offers a transcription system for Persian, the target language in the Transonics project, a speech-to-speech translation system developed as a part of the DARPA Babylon program (The DARPA Babylon Program; Narayanan, 2003). In this paper, we discuss transcription systems needed for automated spoken language processing applications in Persian that uses the Arabic script for writing. This system can easily be modified for Arabic, Dari, Urdu and any other language that uses the Arabic script. The proposed system has two components. One is a phonemic based transcription of sounds for acoustic modelling in Automatic Speech Recognizers and for Text to Speech synthesizer, using ASCII based symbols, rather than International Phonetic Alphabet symbols. The other is a hybrid system that provides a minimally-ambiguous lexical representation that explicitly includes vocalic information; such a representation is needed for language modelling, text to speech synthesis and machine translation.