Morphology-based language modeling for conversational Arabic speech recognition

Language modeling for large-vocabulary conversational Arabic speech recognition is faced with the problem of the complex morphology of Arabic, which increases the perplexity and out-of-vocabulary rate. This problem is compounded by the enormous dialectal variability and differences between spoken and written language. In this paper we investigate improvements in Arabic language modeling by developing various morphology-based language models. We present four different approaches to morphology-based language modeling, including a novel technique called factored language models. Experimental results are presented for both rescoring and first-pass recognition experiments.