Investigations on the use of morpheme level features in Language Models for Arabic LVCSR

A major challenge for Arabic Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) is the rich morphology of Arabic, which leads to high Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rates, and poor Language Model (LM) probabilities. In such cases, the use of morphemes rather than full-words is considered a better choice for LMs. Thereby, higher lexical coverage and less LM perplexities are achieved. On the other side, an effective way to increase the robustness of LMs is to incorporate features of words into LMs. In this paper, we investigate the use of features derived for morphemes rather than words. Thus, we combine the benefits of both morpheme level and feature rich modeling. We compare the performance of stream-based, class-based and Factored LMs (FLMs) estimated over sequences of morphemes and their features for performing Arabic LVCSR. A relative reduction of 3.9% in Word Error Rate (WER) is achieved compared to a word-based system.