The 2 nd Workshop on Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools 2016 Theme
Speech datasets and corpora are crucial for both developing and evaluating accurate Natural Language Processing systems. While Modern Standard Arabic has received more attention, dialects are drastically underestimated, even they are the most used in our daily life and the social media, recently. In this paper, we present the methodology of building an Arabic Speech Corpus for Algerian dialects, and the preliminary version of that dataset of dialectal arabic speeches uttered by Algerian native speakers selected from different Algeria's departments. In fact, by means of a direct recording way, we have taken into acount numerous aspects that foster the richness of the corpus and that provide a representation of phonetic, prosodic and orthographic varieties of Algerian dialects. Among these considerations, we have designed a rich speech topics and content. The annotations provided are some useful information related to the speakers, time aligned orthographic word transcription. Many potential uses can be considered such as speaker/dialect identification and computational linguistic for Algerian sub dialects. In its preliminary version, our corpus encompasses 17 sub dialects with 109 speakers and more than 6 K utterances.