ArzEn: A Speech Corpus for Code-switched Egyptian Arabic-English

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 4237–4246 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 4237 ArzEn: A Speech Corpus for Code-switched Egyptian Arabic-English Injy Hamed1,2, Ngoc Thang Vu2, Slim Abdennadher1 1Computer Science Department, The German University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt 2Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany, {hamediy,thang.vu}@ims.uni-stuttgart.de, slim.abdennadher@guc.edu.eg Abstract In this paper, we present our ArzEn corpus, an Egyptian Arabic-English code-switching (CS) spontaneous speech corpus. The corpus is collected through informal interviews with 38 Egyptian bilingual university students and employees held in a soundproof room. A total of 12 hours are recorded, transcribed, validated and sentence segmented. The corpus is mainly designed to be used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, however, it also provides a useful resource for analyzing the CS phenomenon from linguistic, sociological, and psychological perspectives. In this paper, we first discuss the CS phenomenon in Egypt and the factors that gave rise to the current language. We then provide a detailed description on how the corpus was collected, giving an overview on the participants involved. We also present statistics on the CS involved in the corpus, as well as a summary to the effort exerted in the corpus development, in terms of number of hours required for transcription, validation, segmentation and speaker annotation. Finally, we discuss some factors contributing to the complexity of the corpus, as well as Arabic-English CS behaviour that could pose potential challenges to ASR systems. Keywords: Arabic-English, Dialectal Egyptian Arabic, code-switching, speech corpus, spontaneous speech 1. Introduction The language in Egypt is rather complex and poses many challenges to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. First of all, it is considered as a classic example of “Diglos- sia”, that is, a situation in which one language is used in formal or written realms and a second language in informal or spoken realms (Ferguson, 1959). While Modern Stan- dard Arabic (MSA) is taught in schools and used by people in formal contexts, the Egyptian Dialectal language is the lingua franca used by Egyptians in their daily lives. Beyond this diglossia of Standard and Dialectal Arabic, Egyptians tend to embed foreign languages into their conversations. It is mostly common to embed English, followed by French as a second language. The act of mixing more than one language in a conversation is referred to by linguists as “Code-switching” (CS). Given that MSA and Dialectal Egyptian are considered to be two different languages (Ferguson, 1959), code-switching in Egypt is consid- ered to be rather challenging with the mixing of MSA and Dialectal Arabic as well as Arabic and English. In our work, we are more interested in the latter language pair. According to Poplack (1980), there are three types of lan- guage alternations; extra-sentential CS (where a loan word is borrowed from the secondary language), intra-sentential CS (where the language, or code, switch is done within the same sentence) and inter-sentential CS (where the switch is done across sentences). In …

Content truncated to 500 words