Spoken Tunisian Arabic Corpus "STAC": Transcription and Annotation

Corpora are considered as an important resource for natural language processing (NLP). Currently, the Dialectal Arabic corpora are somewhat limited, particularly in the case of the Tunisian Arabic. In recent years, since the events of the revolution, the increasing presence of spoken Tunisian Arabic in interviews, news and debate programs, the increasing use of language technologies for many spoken languages (e.g., Siri) [6], and the need for works on speech technologies requires a huge amount of well-designed Tunisian spoken corpora. This paper presents the “STAC” corpus (Spoken Tunisian Arabic Corpus) of spontaneous Tunisian Arabic speech. We present our method used for the collection and the transcription of this corpus. Then, we detail the different stages done to enrich the corpus with necessary linguistic and speech annotations that makes it more useful for many NLP applications.