Related papers: More Data, Fewer Diacritics: Scaling Arabic TTS

Understanding Arabic text and generating human-like responses is a challenging endeavor. While many researchers have proposed models and solutions for individual problems, there is an acute shortage of a comprehensive Arabic natural…

While recent neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems perform remarkably well, they typically require a substantial amount of recordings from the target speaker reading in the desired speaking style. In this work, we present a novel 3-step…

The widespread absence of diacritical marks in Arabic text poses a significant challenge for Arabic natural language processing (NLP). This paper explores instances of naturally occurring diacritics, referred to as "diacritics in the wild,"…

Modern speech synthesis techniques can produce natural-sounding speech given sufficient high-quality data and compute resources. However, such data is not readily available for many languages. This paper focuses on speech synthesis for…

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly influenced the landscape of language and speech research. Despite this progress, these models lack specific benchmarking against state-of-the-art (SOTA) models tailored…

Large language models (LLMs) for Arabic are still dominated by Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), with limited support for Saudi dialects such as Najdi and Hijazi. This underrepresentation hinders their ability to capture authentic dialectal…

Developing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for Tunisian Arabic Dialect is challenging due to the dialect's linguistic complexity and the scarcity of annotated speech datasets. To address these challenges, we propose the LinTO…

Although commercial Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems support Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), they struggle with dialectal speech. We investigate the effect of fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper on five major Arabic dialects (Gulf,…

Recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems trained on reading or acted corpora have achieved near human-level naturalness. The diversity of human speech, however, often goes beyond the coverage of these corpora. We believe the ability to handle…

We introduce the largest transcribed Arabic speech corpus, QASR, collected from the broadcast domain. This multi-dialect speech dataset contains 2,000 hours of speech sampled at 16kHz crawled from Aljazeera news channel. The dataset is…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, enhancing capabilities in both language understanding and generation across diverse domains. However, developing LLMs for Arabic presents…

Data sparsity is a main problem hindering the development of code-switching (CS) NLP systems. In this paper, we investigate data augmentation techniques for synthesizing dialectal Arabic-English CS text. We perform lexical replacements…

In this paper, we introduce TEDxTN, the first publicly available Tunisian Arabic to English speech translation dataset. This work is in line with the ongoing effort to mitigate the data scarcity obstacle for a number of Arabic dialects. We…

Tool calling is a critical capability that allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with external systems, significantly expanding their utility. However, research and resources for tool calling are predominantly English-centric,…

Many neural text-to-speech architectures can synthesize nearly natural speech from text inputs. These architectures must be trained with tens of hours of annotated and high-quality speech data. Compiling such large databases for every new…

The performance of learning models heavily relies on the availability and adequacy of training data. To address the dataset adequacy issue, researchers have extensively explored data augmentation (DA) as a promising approach. DA generates…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) plays a vital role in enabling natural human-machine interaction across applications such as virtual assistants, industrial automation, customer support, and real-time transcription. However, developing…

When the available data of a target speaker is insufficient to train a high quality speaker-dependent neural text-to-speech (TTS) system, we can combine data from multiple speakers and train a multi-speaker TTS model instead. Many studies…

With the emergence of neural audio codecs, which encode multiple streams of discrete tokens from audio, large language models have recently gained attention as a promising approach for zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis. Despite the…

We present a scalable method to produce high quality emphasis for text-to-speech (TTS) that does not require recordings or annotations. Many TTS models include a phoneme duration model. A simple but effective method to achieve emphasized…