Collection and Analysis of Code-switch Egyptian Arabic-English Speech Corpus
Injy Hamed, Mohamed Elmahdy, Slim Abdennadher · 2018
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.