Jira: a Kurdish Speech Recognition System Designing and Building Speech Corpus and Pronunciation Lexicon Hadi Veisi* Hawre Hosseini Mohammad MohammadAmini University of Tehran, Ryerson University, Avignon University, Faculty of New Sciences and Electrical and Computer Engineering Laboratoire Informatique d’Avignon (LIA) Technologies
[email protected] mohammad.mohammadamini@univ-
[email protected] avignon.fr Wirya Fathy Aso Mahmudi University of Tehran, University of Tehran, Faculty of New Sciences and Faculty of New Sciences and Technologies Technologies
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the first large vocabulary speech recognition system (LVSR) for the Central Kurdish language, named Jira. The Kurdish language is an Indo-European language spoken by more than 30 million people in several countries, but due to the lack of speech and text resources, there is no speech recognition system for this language. To fill this gap, we introduce the first speech corpus and pronunciation lexicon for the Kurdish language. Regarding speech corpus, we designed a sentence collection in which the ratio of di-phones in the collection resembles the real data of the Central Kurdish language. The designed sentences are uttered by 576 speakers in a controlled environment with noise-free microphones (called AsoSoft Speech-Office) and in Telegram social network environment using mobile phones (denoted as AsoSoft Speech-Crowdsourcing), resulted in 43.68 hours of speech. Besides, a test set including 11 different document topics is designed and recorded in two corresponding speech conditions (i.e., Office and Crowdsourcing). Furthermore, a 60K pronunciation lexicon is prepared in this research in which we faced several challenges and proposed solutions for them.