CV-18 NER: Augmented Common Voice for Named Entity Recognition from Arabic Speech

We present Ara-BEST-RQ, a family of self-supervised learning (SSL) models specifically designed for multi-dialectal Arabic speech processing. Leveraging 5,640 hours of crawled Creative Commons speech and combining it with publicly available datasets, we pre-train conformer-based BEST-RQ models up to 600M parameters. Our models are evaluated on dialect identification (DID) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the former while using fewer parameters than competing models. We demonstrate that family-targeted pre-training on Arabic dialects significantly improves downstream performance compared to multilingual or monolingual models trained on non-Arabic data. All models, code, and pre-processed datasets will be publicly released to support reproducibility and further research in Arabic speech technologies.

Recognizing emotions from speech using machine learning has become an active research area due to its importance in building human-centered applications. However, while many studies have been conducted in English, German, and other European and Asian languages, research in Arabic remains scarce because of the limited availability of annotated datasets. In this paper, we present an Arabic Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) system based on a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture. The model leverages convolutional layers to extract discriminative spectral features from Mel-spectrogram inputs and Transformer encoders to capture long-range temporal dependencies in speech. Experiments were conducted on the EYASE (Egyptian Arabic speech emotion) corpus, and the proposed model achieved 97.8% accuracy and a macro F1-score of 0.98. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining convolutional feature extraction with attention-based modeling for Arabic SER and highlight the potential of Transformer-based approaches in low-resource languages.

Speech-to-text engines are extremely needed nowadays for different applications, representing an essential enabler in human-robot interaction. Still, some languages suffer from the lack of labeled speech data, especially in the Arabic dialects or any low-resource languages. The need for a self-supervised training process and self-training using noisy training is proven to be one of the up-and-coming feasible solutions. This article proposes an end-to-end, transformers-based model with a framework for low-resource languages. In addition, the framework incorporates customized audio-to-text processing algorithms to achieve a highly efficient Jordanian Arabic dialect speech-to-text system. The proposed framework enables ingesting data from many sources, making the ground truth from external sources possible by speeding up the manual annotation process. The framework allows the training process using noisy student training and self-supervised learning to utilize the unlabeled data in both pre- and post-training stages and incorporate multiple types of data augmentation. The proposed self-training approach outperforms the fine-tuned Wav2Vec model by 5% in terms of word error rate reduction. The outcome of this work provides the research community with a Jordanian-spoken data set along with an end-to-end approach to deal with low-resource languages. This is done by utilizing the power of the pretraining, post-training, and injecting noisy labeled and augmented data with minimal human intervention. It enables the development of new applications in the field of Arabic language speech-to-text area like the question-answering systems and intelligent control systems, and it will add human-like perception and hearing sensors to intelligent robots.