Collection and Analysis of Code-switch Egyptian Arabic-English Speech Corpus

Abstract

Speech corpora are key components needed by both: linguists (in language analyses, research and teaching languages) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) researchers (in training and evaluating several NLP tasks such as speech recognition, text-to-speech and speech-to-text synthesis). Despite of the great demand, there is still a huge shortage in available corpora, especially in the case of dialectal languages, and code-switched speech. In this paper, we present our efforts in collecting and analyzing a speech corpus for conversational Egyptian Arabic. As in other multilingual societies, it is common among Egyptians to use a mix of Arabic and English in daily conversations. The act of switching languages, at sentence boundaries or within the same sentence, is referred to as code-switching. The aim of this work is a three-fold: (1) gather conversational Egyptian Arabic spontaneous speech, (2) obtain manual transcriptions and (3) analyze the speech from the code-switching perspective. A subset of the transcriptions were manually annotated for part-of-speech (POS) tags. The POS distribution of the embedded words was analyzed as well as the POS distribution for the trigger words (Arabic words preceding a code-switching point). The speech corpus can be obtained by contacting the authors.

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