Collection and Analysis of Code-switch Egyptian Arabic-English Speech Corpus

Collection and Analysis of Code-switch Egyptian Arabic-English Speech Corpus Injy Hamed, Mohamed Elmahdy, Slim Abdennadher The German University in Cairo El Tagamoa El Khames, New Cairo, Cairo, Egypt {injy.hamed, mohamed.elmahdy, slim.abdennadher}@guc.edu.eg Abstract Speech corpora are key components needed by both: linguists (in language analyses, research and teaching languages) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) researchers (in training and evaluating several NLP tasks such as speech recognition, text-to-speech and speech-to-text synthesis). Despite of the great demand, there is still a huge shortage in available corpora, especially in the case of dialectal languages, and code-switched speech. In this paper, we present our efforts in collecting and analyzing a speech corpus for conversational Egyptian Arabic. As in other multilingual societies, it is common among Egyptians to use a mix of Arabic and English in daily conversations. The act of switching languages, at sentence boundaries or within the same sentence, is referred to as code-switching. The aim of this work is a three-fold: (1) gather conversational Egyptian Arabic spontaneous speech, (2) obtain manual transcriptions and (3) analyze the speech from the code-switching perspective. A subset of the transcriptions were manually annotated for part-of-speech (POS) tags. The POS distribution of the embedded words was analyzed as well as the POS distribu- tion for the trigger words (Arabic words preceding a code-switching point). The speech corpus can be obtained by contacting the authors. Keywords: Speech corpus, Dialectal Egyptian Arabic, Conversational Egyptian Arabic, Egyptian Arabic-English, code-switching, code-mixing 1. Introduction The Arabic language is one of the most widely used languages in the world. It is the 6th most used language based on number of of native speakers. Nearly 250 million persons use Arabic as their first language and it is the second language for around four times that number (Elmahdy et al., 2009). There are three types of the Arabic language: Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and Colloquial (dialectal) Arabic. The classical Arabic is the most formal type of Arabic. It is used in the Quran and early Islamic literature. MSA is the official modern language used in the Arab world. It is derived from the Classical Arabic, with some simplifications such as removal of diacritic marks. MSA is the form of Arabic taught in schools and is used in writings, formal speeches, interviews, news broadcasts, movies’ subtitling and education. However, MSA is not the language used in everyday life and is considered as a second language for all Arabic-speakers. Each country or region within a country has its own dialect. Colloquial (dialectal) Arabic is the language used in daily conversations and informal writings such as chats, blogs and comments on on-line social media such as Facebook and Twitter. However, they do not necessarily have a standard written form. In addition to the three forms of Arabic, as in other mul- tilingual environments, many Arabic-speakers use code- switching and code-mixing in their conversations. Such mixed speech is usually defined as a mixture of two distinct languages: primary language (also known as the matrix language); which is spoken …

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