Thailand

Zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) systems have advanced for English, however, it still lags behind due to insufficient resources. We address this gap for Arabic, a language of more than 450 million native speakers, by first adapting a sizeable existing dataset to suit the needs of speech synthesis. Additionally, we employ a set of Arabic dialect identification models to explore the impact of pre-defined dialect labels on improving the ZS-TTS model in a multi-dialect setting. Subsequently, we fine-tune the XTTS model, an open-source architecture. We then evaluate our models on a dataset comprising 31 unseen speakers and an in-house dialectal dataset. Our automated and human evaluation results show convincing performance while capable of generating dialectal speech. Our study highlights significant potential for improvements in this emerging area of research in Arabic.

ACL 2024

Towards Zero-Shot Text-To-Speech for Arabic Dialects

zero-shot multi-speaker tts

arabic dialects

speech processing

workshop paper

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Speech encoders pretrained through self-supervised learning (SSL) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various downstream tasks, including Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). For instance, fine-tuning SSL models for such tasks has shown significant potential, leading to improvements in the SOTA performance across challenging datasets. In contrast to existing research, this paper contributes by comparing the effectiveness of SSL approaches in the context of (i) the low-resource Spoken Tunisian Arabic Dialect and (ii) its combination with a low-resource SLU and ASR scenario, where only a few semantic annotations are available for fine-tuning. We conducted experiments using many SSL speech encoders on the TARIC-SLU dataset. We used speech encoders that were pre-trained on either monolingual or multilingual speech data. Some of them have also been refined without in-domain nor Tunisian data through a multimodal supervised teacher-student learning. The study made in this paper yields numerous significant findings that we will discuss in the paper.

Performance Analysis of Speech Encoders for Low-Resource SLU and ASR in Tunisian Dialect

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for a wide range of language generation tasks. Nevertheless, this progress has been slower in Arabic. In this work, we focus on the task of generating stories from LLMs. For our training, we use stories acquired through machine translation (MT) as well as GPT-4. For the MT data, we develop a careful pipeline that ensures we acquire high-quality stories. For our GPT-4footnote{GPT-4 refers to GPT-4-0125-preview} data, we introduce crafted prompts that allow us to generate data well-suited to the Arabic context in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and two Arabic dialects (Egyptian and Moroccan). For example, we generate stories tailored to various Arab countries on a wide host of topics. Our manual evaluation shows that our model fine-tuned on these training datasets can generate coherent stories that adhere to our instructions. We also conduct an extensive automatic and human evaluation comparing our models against state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models. Our datasets and models will be made publicly available at url{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/arastories}.

Arabic Automatic Story Generation with Large Language Models

Pre-trained Language Models （PLMs） are integral to many modern natural language processing （NLP） systems. Although multilingual models cover a wide range of languages, they often grapple with challenges like high inference costs and a lack of diverse non-English training data. Arabic-specific PLMs are trained predominantly on modern standard Arabic, which compromises their performance on regional dialects. To tackle this, we construct an Arabic dialectal corpus comprising 3.4M sentences gathered from social media platforms. We utilize this corpus to expand the vocabulary and retrain a BERT-based model from scratch. Named AlcLaM, our model was trained using only 13GB of text, which represents a fraction of the data used by existing models such as CAMeL, MARBERT, and ArBERT, compared to 7.8%%， and 21.3%， respectively. Remarkably, AlcLaM demonstrates superior performance on a variety of Arabic NLP tasks despite the limited training data. AlcLaM is available at: https://github.com/amurtadha/Alclam.

AlclaM: Arabic Dialect Language Model

This paper describes a data augmentation technique for boosting the performance of speech-based diacritic restoration. Our experiments demonstrate the utility of this appraoch, resulting in improved generalization of all models across different test sets. In addition, we describe the first multi-modal diacritic restoration model, utilizing both speech and text as input modalities. This type of model can be used to diacritize speech transcripts. Unlike previous work that relies on an external ASR model, the proposed model is far more compact and efficient. While the multi-modal framework does not surpass the ASR-based model for this task, it offers a promising approach for improving the efficiency of speech-based diacritization, with a potential for improvement using data augmentation and other methods.

Data Augmentation for Speech-Based Diacritic Restoration

We study dependency parsing for four Arabic dialects (Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghrebi). Since no syntactically annotated data exist for Arabic dialects, we train the parser on a Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) corpus, which creates an out-of-domain setting. We investigate methods to close the gap between the source (MSA) and target data (dialects), e.g., by training on syntactically similar sentences to the test data. For testing, we manually annotate a small data set from a dialectal corpus. We focus on parsing two linguistic phenomena, which are difficult to parse: Idafa and coordination. We find that we can improve results by adding in-domain MSA data while adding dialectal embeddings only results in minor improvements.

Out-of-Domain Dependency Parsing for Dialects of Arabic: A Case Study

Native Language Identification (NLI) is concerned with predicting the native language of an author writing in a second language. We investigate NLI for Arabic, with a focus on the types of linguistic information given that Arabic is morphologically rich. We use the Arabic Learner Corpus (ALC) foro training and testing along with a linear SVM. We explore lexical, morpho-syntactic, and syntactic features. Results show that the best single type of information is character n-grams ranging from 2 to 6. Using this model, we achieve an accuracy of 61.84%, thus outperforming previous results (Ionesco, 2015) by 11.74% even though we use an additional 2 L1s. However, when using prefix and suffix sequences, we reach an accuracy of 53.95%, showing that an approximation of unlexicalized features still reaches solid results.

Investigating Linguistic Features for Arabic NLI

Large language models (LLMs) play a crucial role in a wide range of real world applications. However, concerns about their safety and ethical implications are growing. While research on LLM safety is expanding, there is a noticeable gap in evaluating safety across multiple languages, especially in Arabic and Russian. We address this gap by exploring biases in LLMs across different languages and contexts, focusing on GPT-3.5 and Gemini. Through carefully designed argument-based prompts and scenarios in Arabic, English, and Russian, we examine biases in cultural, political, racial, religious, and gender domains. Our findings reveal biases in these domains. In particular, our investigation uncovers subtle biases where each model tends to present winners as those speaking the primary language the model is prompted with. Our study contributes to ongoing efforts to ensure justice and equality in LLM development and emphasizes the importance of further research towards responsible progress in this field.

John vs. Ahmed: Debate-Induced Bias in Multilingual LLMs

Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwriting Recognition (HWR) pose unique challenges due to the cursive and context-sensitive nature of the Arabic script. This study introduces ***Qalam***, a novel foundation model designed for Arabic OCR and HWR, built on a SwinV2 encoder and RoBERTa decoder architecture. Our model significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a Word Error Rate (WER) of just 0.80% in HWR tasks and 1.18% in OCR tasks. We train ***Qalam*** on a diverse dataset, including over 4.5 million images from Arabic manuscripts and a synthetic dataset comprising 60k image-text pairs. Notably, ***Qalam*** demonstrates exceptional handling of Arabic diacritics, a critical feature in Arabic scripts. Furthermore, it shows a remarkable ability to process high-resolution inputs, addressing a common limitation in current OCR systems. These advancements underscore ***Qalam***'s potential as a leading solution for Arabic script recognition, offering a significant leap in accuracy and efficiency.

Qalam: A Multimodal LLM for Arabic Optical Character and Handwriting Recognition

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to significant improvements in various natural language processing tasks. However, the evaluation of LLMs’ legal knowledge, particularly in non English languages such as Arabic, remains under-explored. To address this gap, we introduce ArabLegalEval, a multitask benchmark dataset for assessing the Arabic legal knowledge of LLMs. Inspired by the MMLU and LegalBench datasets, ArabLegalEval consists of multiple tasks sourced from Saudi legal documents and synthesized questions. In this work, we aim to analyze the capabilities required to solve legal problems in Arabic and benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs. We explore the impact of in-context learning on performance and investigate various evaluation methods. Additionally, we explore workflows for automatically generating questions with automatic validation to enhance the dataset’s quality. By releasing ArabLegalEval and our code, we hope to accelerate AI research in the Arabic Legal domain

ArabLegalEval: A Multitask Benchmark for Assessing Arabic Legal Knowledge in Large Language Models

Tashkeel, or Arabic Text Diacritization (ATD), greatly enhances the comprehension of Arabic text by removing ambiguity and minimizing the risk of misinterpretations caused by its absence. It plays a crucial role in improving Arabic text processing, particularly in applications such as text-to-speech and machine translation. This paper introduces a new approach to training ATD models. First, we finetuned two transformers, encoder-only and encoder-decoder, that were initialized from a pretrained character-based BERT. Then, we applied the Noisy-Student approach to boost the performance of the best model. We evaluated our models alongside 11 commercial and open-source models using two manually labeled benchmark datasets: WikiNews and our CATT dataset. Our findings show that our top model surpasses all evaluated models by relative Diacritic Error Rates (DERs) of 30.83% and 35.21% on WikiNews and CATT, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art in ATD. In addition, we show that our model outperforms GPT-4-turbo on CATT dataset by a relative DER of 9.36%. We open-source our CATT models and benchmark dataset for the research community footnote{ https://github.com/abjadai/catt }.

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Performance Analysis of Speech Encoders for Low-Resource SLU and ASR in Tunisian Dialect

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