ZAEBUC-Spoken: A Multilingual Multidialectal Arabic-English Speech Corpus

Injy Hamed, Fadhl Eryani, David Palfreyman, Nizar Habash


Abstract
We present ZAEBUC-Spoken, a multilingual multidialectal Arabic-English speech corpus. The corpus comprises twelve hours of Zoom meetings involving multiple speakers role-playing a work situation where Students brainstorm ideas for a certain topic and then discuss it with an Interlocutor. The meetings cover different topics and are divided into phases with different language setups. The corpus presents a challenging set for automatic speech recognition (ASR), including two languages (Arabic and English) with Arabic spoken in multiple variants (Modern Standard Arabic, Gulf Arabic, and Egyptian Arabic) and English used with various accents. Adding to the complexity of the corpus, there is also code-switching between these languages and dialects. As part of our work, we take inspiration from established sets of transcription guidelines to present a set of guidelines handling issues of conversational speech, code-switching and orthography of both languages. We further enrich the corpus with two layers of annotations; (1) dialectness level annotation for the portion of the corpus where mixing occurs between different variants of Arabic, and (2) automatic morphological annotations, including tokenization, lemmatization, and part-of-speech tagging.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1546
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
17770–17782
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1546
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Injy Hamed, Fadhl Eryani, David Palfreyman, and Nizar Habash. 2024. ZAEBUC-Spoken: A Multilingual Multidialectal Arabic-English Speech Corpus. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 17770–17782, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
ZAEBUC-Spoken: A Multilingual Multidialectal Arabic-English Speech Corpus (Hamed et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1546.pdf