Design and Implementation of a Diacritic Arabic Text-To-Speech System

Aissa Amrouche ¹, Leila Falek ² and Hocine Teffahi ³

^{1, 2, 3} Laboratory of Spoken communication and signal processing, Electronics and Computer Science

Faculty, University of Sciences and Technology HOUARI BOUMEDIENE, Algeria.

¹ Scientific and Technical Research Centre for Development of Arabic Language, Algeria.

Abstract: The absence of the diacritical marks from the modern Arabic text generates a significant increase of the ambiguity in the Arabic text, which can cause confusion in the pronunciation of a written word. Despite the fact that the reader with a certain level of Arabic knowledge can easily recover the missing diacritics by: Using the words context, the morphology and the syntax knowledge of the Arabic language. This paper describes a design and implementation of a Text-To-Speech (TTS) system for a diacritic Arabic text. The goal of this project is to obtain a set of high quality speech synthesizer based on unit selection using a bi-grams model taking into account the particularities of the language. It takes a diacritic Arabic text as input and produces corresponding speech; the output is available as male voice. The evaluation of our TTS system is based on subjective and objective tests. The final evaluation of GArabic TTS system, regarding the intelligibility, naturalness aspects (listening) and the quality (PESQ) is jugged successful.

Keywords: Diacritics, arabic language, diacritization, TTS, speech synthesis, unit selection, bi-grams model.

Received January 8, 2015; accepted April 23, 2015