Empirical study of neural network language models for Arabic speech recognition

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the use of neural network language models for Arabic speech recognition. By using a distributed representation of words, the neural network model allows for more robust generalization and is better able to fight the data sparseness problem. We investigate different configurations of the neural probabilistic model, experimenting with such parameters as N-gram order, output vocabulary, normalization method, and model size and parameters. Experiments were carried out on Arabic broadcast news and broadcast conversations data and the optimized neural network language models showed significant improvements over the baseline N-gram model.