Arabic Computing Research Group

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has long been recognized as an integral part of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It has been realized by many nations that development of indigenous ASR research would enable a wide utilization of the ICT, and they place it among the important and strategic ICT goals for the economic development of nations. This group had been previously involved in a number of KACSTsupported projects, which led to the development of an Arabic-text-to-speech system, and development of a technique for automatic generation of the Arabic diacritical marks. More recently, during the last KACST supported project, the team members transferred the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology and established a research and development infrastructure based on the state-of-the-art Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)speech recognition tools. The team also imported the most recent version of the speech recognition tools, known as HTK, which was developed by Cambridge University. The developed research platform would enable the team to pursue further research in Arabic speech recognition. They built a speech corpus of Modern Standard Arabic, built an Arabic phonetic dictionary, and a statistical model for natural Arabic Language. A complete speaker-independent Arabic natural language was then developed and achieved an accuracy of about 90%. The team is now seeking further support to develop the next generation of Arabic speech recognition systems, and to develop and commercialize applications based on the developed technology. The support will enable the team to pursue the research and development in three directions; the first direction aims to continue expanding and improving the developed Automatic Arabic Speech Recognition (AASR). The second direction seeks to explore recent or new techniques for the next generation of Arabic speech recognition. In the third direction, the team will develop specific AASR prototype applications for possible commercialization


Group Members

	Dr. Husni Al-Muhtaseb (ICS) (Group Coordinator)
	Dr. Wasfi Al-Khatib (ICS)
	Dr. L. Ghouti (ICS)
	Dr. Atif Al-Najjar (COE)
	Dr. Abdulkarim Al-Zahrani (IAS)
	Dr. Mansour Al-Ghamdi (KACST)
	Dr. Moustafa El-Shafei​ (SE)