Advances in Arabic Broadcast News Transcription at RWTH

This paper describes the RWTH speech recognition system for Arabic. Several design aspects of the system, including cross-adaptation, multiple system design and combination, are analyzed. We summarize the semi-automatic lexicon generation for Arabic using a statistical approach to grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and pronunciation statistics. Furthermore, a novel ASR-based audio segmentation algorithm is presented. Finally, we discuss practical approaches for parallelized acoustic training and memory efficient lattice rescoring. Systematic results are reported on recent GALE evaluation corpora.