Name: Arabic Speech Corpus
Description: The corpus was recorded in south Levantine Arabic (Damascian accent) using a professional studio.
Provider: SOUTHAMPTON University
Paper Title: Modern Standard Arabic Speech Corpus
  
Tasks: speech recognition
Venue Name: nan
Authors: Nawar Halabi,Gary B Wills
Abstract: Corpus design for speech synthesis is a well-researched topic in languages such as English
  compared to Modern Standard Arabic, and there is a tendency to focus on methods to automatically
  generate the orthographic transcript to be recorded (usually greedy methods), which was used in
  this work. In this work, a study of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) phonetics and phonology is
  conducted in order to develop criteria for a greedy method to create a MSA speech corpus
  transcript for recording. The size of the dataset is reduced a number of times using optimisation
  methods with different parameters to yield a much smaller dataset with the identical phonetic
  coverage offered before the reduction. The resulting output transcript is then chosen for recording.
  A phoneme set and a phonotactic rule-set are created for automatically generating a phonetic
  transcript of normalised MSA text which is used to annotate and segment the speech corpus after
  recording, achieving 82.5% boundary precision with some manual alignments (~15% of the
  corpus) to increase the precision of the automatic alignment. This is part of a larger work to create
  a completely annotated and segmented speech corpus for MSA speech synthesis with an evaluation
  of the quality of this speech corpus and, where possible, the quality of each stage in the process.
  