What we have and what is needed, how to evaluate Arabic Speech Synthesizer?

Doush, Iyad Abu; Alkhatib, Faisal; Bsoul, Abed Al Raoof

doi:10.1007/s10772-015-9304-6

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…We reviewed the recent studies on the evaluation of Arabic TTS systems. In their study [23], the authors evaluate six Arabic TTS systems using four intelligibility tests: (1) Diagnostic Rhyme, (2) Modified Rhyme, (3) Phonetically Confusable Sentences, and the fourth one is related to the prediction of the diacritics of the input text and was proposed by the authors themselves. Another two tests were performed: (5) Arabic Text with All Sounds and (6) Best/Worst Pleasant Voice, which were proposed by the authors to determine the voice pleasantness.…”

Section: Evaluation Of Screenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Full Diacritization of the Arabic Text to Improve Screen Readers for the Visually Impaired

Abuali

Kurdy

2022

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction

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This paper aims to find the relationship between the full diacritization of the Arabic text and the quality of the speech synthesized in screen readers and presents a new methodology to develop screen readers for the visually impaired, focusing on preprocessing and diacritization of the text before converting it to audio. First, the actual need for our proposal was measured by conducting a MOS (Mean Opinion Score) questionnaire to evaluate the quality of the speech synthesized before and after full diacritization in the NVDA (https://www.nvda-ar.org/) screen reader. Then, an e-reader was built by integrating two models: the first one is for automatic Arabic diacritization (depending on Shakkala), and the second is a TTS model (depending on Tacotron). The quality of our proposed system was measured in terms of (1) pronunciation and (2) intelligibility, in which our system outperformed the commercial screen readers, NVDA and IBSAR (https://www.sakhr.com), as it recorded 60.67%, 17.67%, and 21.67% as correct, incorrect, and partially correct, respectively, for the isolated word test, and 84% correct results for the homograph test, and 78.50% and 93% correct results, respectively, for the DRT and DMRT tests.

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Section: Evaluation Of Screenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Full Diacritization of the Arabic Text to Improve Screen Readers for the Visually Impaired

Abuali

Kurdy

2022

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction

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“…Arabic is considered the official language in 25 countries, and it is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. More than 250 million people speak Arabic in their daily life (Doush et al, 2016). Yet, available AAC systems use non-Arabic devices and integrate the Arabic sound by prerecording built-in phrases.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An AAC tablet application for children with language impairment

Al-Ghurair

Alnaqi²,

Doush³

2021

JER is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes f

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People with communication impairment need an alternative communication channel to complete daily activities. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems can help provide a communication medium to support such users. The involvement of speech and language pathologists (SLPs) who work in rehabilitation centers can help develop better solutions. This paper presents the development of an AAC tablet application that uses pictures on the screen and voice feedback to help children with language impairment improve the efficiency in their communication. The proposed solution maps the sentences commonly used by children into appealing symbols. The children can use these symbols instead of constructing sentences from scratch, as done by most of the previously proposed solutions in the literature. The application was evaluated by SLPs on six children with language impairment. This research presents a design methodology when providing such a solution for touch screen devices for people with language impairment. A set of accessibility guidelines is proposed for AAC computer-based solutions, which can help researchers and practitioners. The obtained results prove that the proposed system improves the children’s stimulation to communicate and decreases communication time. Such a solution can assist therapists as a resource to improve their patients’ communication.

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