Open-Source Boundary-Annotated Corpus for Arabic Speech and Language Processing
Claire Brierley, Majdi Sawalha, Eric Atwell · 2012
A boundary-annotated and part-of-speech tagged corpus is a prerequisite for developing phrase break classifiers.Boundary annotations in English speech corpora are descriptive, delimiting intonation units perceived by the listener.We take a novel approach to phrase break prediction for Arabic, deriving our prosodic annotation scheme from Tajwīd (recitation) mark-up in the Qur"an which we then interpret as additional text-based data for computational analysis.This mark-up is prescriptive, and signifies a widely-used recitation style, and one of seven original styles of transmission.Here we report on version 1.0 of our Boundary-Annotated Qur"an dataset of 77430 words and 8230 sentences, where each word is tagged with prosodic and syntactic information at two coarse-grained levels.In (Sawalha et al., 2012), we use the dataset in phrase break prediction experiments.This research is part of a larger-scale project to produce annotation schemes, language resources, algorithms, and applications for Classical and Modern Standard Arabic.