Applsci 12 08898 v2

applied
sciences
Review
Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition: A Systematic
Literature Review
Amira Dhouib *, Achraf Othman * , Oussama El Ghoul , Mohamed Koutheair Khribi and Aisha Al Sinani
Mada Center, Doha P.O. Box 24230, Qatar

* Correspondence: [email protected] (A.D.); [email protected] (A.O.)
Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), also known as Speech-To-Text (STT) or computer
speech recognition, has been an active field of research recently. This study aims to chart this field
by performing a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to give insight into the ASR studies proposed,
especially for the Arabic language. The purpose is to highlight the trends of research about Arabic
ASR and guide researchers with the most significant studies published over ten years from 2011
to 2021. This SLR attempts to tackle seven specific research questions related to the toolkits used
for developing and evaluating Arabic ASR, the supported type of the Arabic language, the used
feature extraction/classification techniques, the type of speech recognition, the performance of Arabic
ASR, the existing gaps facing researchers, along with some future research. Across five databases,
38 studies met our defined inclusion criteria. Our results showed different open-source toolkits to
support Arabic speech recognition. The most prominent ones were KALDI, HTK, then CMU Sphinx
toolkits. A total of 89.47% of the retained studies cover modern standard Arabic, whereas 26.32% of
them were dedicated to different dialects of Arabic. MFCC and HMM were presented as the most
used feature extraction and classification techniques, respectively: 63% of the papers were based on
MFCC and 21% were based on HMM. The review also shows that the performance of Arabic ASR
systems depends mainly on different criteria related to the availability of resources, the techniques
used for acoustic modeling, and the used datasets.
Citation: Dhouib, A.; Othman, A.; El
Ghoul, O.; Khribi, M.K.; Al Sinani, A. Keywords: Arabic language processing; automatic speech recognition; Arabic Speech-To-Text;
Arabic Automatic Speech systematic literature review
Recognition: A Systematic Literature
Review. Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898.
https://doi.org/10.3390/
app12178898
1. Introduction
Academic Editor: Lijiang Chen Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) represents a particular case of digital signal
Received: 2 August 2022
processing, which comprises statistics, phonetics, linguistics, and machine learning. It
Accepted: 31 August 2022
can be defined as a technology by which the spoken words are converted into textual
Published: 5 September 2022
representation, using software to recognize human voice and speech [1,2]. Recently, auto-
matic speech recognition systems have become the subject of increasing interest for diverse
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral
speech/language researchers and academics. This interest is reflected in their emergence
with regard to jurisdictional claims in
in various areas, such as health, education, dictation, and robotics [3]. With the rapid
published maps and institutional affil-
progress of technologies, ASR systems are adopted by various applications due to their
iations.
functionality and ease of use. For example, they are applied in dictation software, which
can be a constructive PC tool for accessibility benefits. Another application is using voice
control commands and search with mobile devices. They can also be associated with speech
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors.
translation from a source to a target language. The ASR systems have been considered for a
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. long time as a valuable and helpful input technique for a range of categories of disabilities
This article is an open access article since it is based on speech as an input technique alternating traditional manual techniques
distributed under the terms and via keyboards and mouses [4]. However, automatic speech recognition is considered a
conditions of the Creative Commons challenging task in the signal processing field as it requires several layers of processing to
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// reach a high level of accuracy and lower Word Error Rate (WER).
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ The Arabic language is considered one of the official languages in twenty-two countries
4.0/). situated in the Middle East, Africa, and the Gulf. It is ranked as the fifth most extensively
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898. https://doi.org/10.3390/app12178898 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci

Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 2 of 22
used language worldwide [5] and is used by more than 422 million native and non-native
people [6,7]. According to [8], the Arabic language can be classified according to three
primary types, namely:
• Classical Arabic represents the most formal and standard form of Arabic as it is mainly
used in the Holy Quran and the religious instructions of Islam [1];
• Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) represents the current formal linguistic standard of
the Arabic language. It is generally used in written communication and media, and is
taught in educational institutions [1];
• Dialectal Arabic (DA), also called colloquial Arabic, is a variation of the same language
specific to countries or social groups used in everyday life. Various dialects of Arabic
exist, and, sometimes, more than one DA can be used within a country [1].
Based on the study of Elnagar et al. [6], the DA can be categorized according to the
following varieties:
1. North Africa, which includes the Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, Mauritanian, and
Libyan dialects;
2. Gulf dialect, which includes Qatari, Kuwaiti, Saudi, Omani, Bahraini, and Emirati dialects;
3. Nile Basin, including the Egyptian and Sudanese dialects;
4. Yemeni dialect;
5. Iraqi dialect;
6. Levantine dialect is often used in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and western Jordan [9].
Compared to the existing research on ASR for the English language, the ASR for the
Arabic language received little attention due to its consideration as a limited resource
language [10]. The main challenges of the Arabic language remain specific to the existence
of enormous dialects with various pronunciations, the morphological complexity, and the
difficulty of acquiring a diacritized transcription of the speech corpora, which is not very
commonly open-source, etc. [11]. Toward building a robust Arabic ASR system, it is highly
recommended and more accurate to use extensive speech collections. According to [12], an
extensive vocabulary means that the dataset contains approximately 20k to 60k words.
Several overviews and survey studies have been published to review various aspects
of Arabic speech recognition. In 2018, the authors of [13] published a literature survey
paper that discusses the Arabic ASR. The survey shows that few freely available continuous
speech corpora exist. It also shows a need to compile large corpora. In another study,
Algihab et al. [14] review the available studies on Arabic speech recognition along with the
available services and toolkits for the development of Arabic speech recognition systems.
The focus was on Arabic ASR using deep learning. Seventeen papers were reviewed and
presented according to the recognized entity and learning techniques. A more recent study
by Abdelhamid et al. [8] presents Arabic speech recognition systems from the end-to-end
methodology perspective. The study focuses on two types of the Arabic language, namely
MSA and dialectal Arabic. It presents the end-to-end Arabic speech recognition systems
proposed between 2017 and 2019. It also presents the available API Services and toolkits
essential for building end-to-end models. Another work that reports on the reviews of ASR
systems for isolated Arabic words was proposed in 2021 by Shareef and Irhayim [15]. The
authors focused on ASR systems based on artificial intelligence techniques and summarized
16 studies according to four criteria. These include speech recognition types, classification
techniques, feature extraction techniques, and accuracy rates.
This paper is a follow-up of studies conducted about automatic speech recognition
studies proposed for the Arabic language, where the need for broader research on this
topic was recognized. The goal is to conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of
Arabic automatic speech recognition to guide researchers by providing them with the
most significant studies published recently. To the best of our knowledge, this is the
first systematic review that presents the landscape of Arabic ASR studies. Our goal is to
highlight the progress made in the Arabic ASR field over ten years, starting from 2011 till
2021. This systematic literature review will also guide speech and language researchers
Arabic automatic speech recognition to guide researchers by providing them with the
most significant studies published recently. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
systematic review that presents the landscape of Arabic ASR studies. Our goal is to high‐
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 light the progress made in the Arabic ASR field over ten years, starting from 2011 till 2021.
3 of 22
This systematic literature review will also guide speech and language researchers and ac‐
ademics to define the significant research gaps in the field and to open perspectives for
future research.
and academics to define the significant research gaps in the field and to open perspectives
The remaining paper is organized into five sections. Section 2 presents a brief back‐
for future research.
ground of Arabic ASR. Section 3 describes the adopted research method in this systematic
The remaining paper is organized into five sections. Section 2 presents a brief back-
literature
ground of review. The Section
Arabic ASR. formulated primary
3 describes theand secondary
adopted researchresearch
methodquestions are an‐
in this systematic
swered in Section 4. The conclusions are presented in the last section.
literature review. The formulated primary and secondary research questions are answered
in Section 4. The conclusions are presented in the last section.
2. Background
2. Background
Automatic speech recognition concerns the automated conversion of speech or audio
waves into textsspeech
Automatic exploitable by a machine
recognition concerns through analyzing
the automated and processing
conversion speech
of speech sig‐
or audio
nals
waves using different
into texts techniques
exploitable such as through
by a machine Convolutional
analyzing Neural Network (CNN)
and processing speech [16]
signalsor
deep
usinglearning
different[17]. The design
techniques of as
such an Convolutional
ASR architecture system
Neural depends(CNN)
Network on various compo‐
[16] or deep
nents
learning and[17].
tasks
Thelike preprocessing,
design of an ASRnoise detection,
architecture speech
system classification,
depends andcomponents
on various feature ex‐
traction.
and tasksFigure 1 presents a generic
like preprocessing, architecture
noise detection, used classification,
speech in the development of ASRextraction.
and feature systems.
Three
Figuremain modules
1 presents can bearchitecture
a generic identified inused
a traditional speech recognition
in the development of ASR system
systems.[4]. The
Three
first
mainone corresponds
modules can betoidentified
speech pre‐processing,
in a traditionalwhich
speech aims to removesystem
recognition undesirable
[4]. Thenoises
first
one corresponds
from to speech
the speech signal and pre-processing,
identify speech which
activityaims
[18].toThe
remove
secondundesirable noises from
module concerns fea‐
the speech
ture signal
extraction, in and identify
which speech
essential dataactivity [18]. The
are extracted from second module
a speech. concerns
The third feature
module re‐
extraction,
fers in which essential
to the classification, whichdata
aimsaretoextracted from a speech.
find the parameter The memory.
set from third module refers to
the classification, which aims to find the parameter set from memory.
Figure
Figure 1.
1. Automatic
Automatic speech
speech recognition
recognition architecture.
architecture.
The critical
The critical challenge
challenge in in developing
developing highly
highly accurate
accurate Arabic
Arabic ASRASR systems
systems isis selecting
selecting
feature extraction and classification techniques [19]. Mel Frequency Cepstral
feature extraction and classification techniques [19]. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient Coefficient
(MFCC) and
(MFCC) and Perceptual
Perceptual Linear
Linear Predictive
Predictive (PLP)
(PLP) are
are the
the most
most common
common techniques
techniques used
used forfor
feature extraction. In the systematic literature review presented by Nassif
feature extraction. In the systematic literature review presented by Nassif et al. [20], foret al. [20], for
instance, 69.5%
instance, 69.5% ofof the
the retained
retained papers
papers used
used the
the MFCC
MFCC technique
technique to to extract
extract features
features from
from
speech. A wide range of techniques can also be used for classification. Examples
speech. A wide range of techniques can also be used for classification. Examples of these of these
techniques are
techniques are Artificial
Artificial Neutral
Neutral Network
Network (ANN),
(ANN), Hidden
Hidden Markov
Markov Model
Model (HMM),
(HMM), and and
Dynamic Time Warping
Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). (DTW).
The development
The developmentofofArabic Arabicspeech
speech recognition
recognition systems
systems hashas increased
increased inpast
in the the dec‐
past
decades thanks to the availability of different open sources and toolkits
ades thanks to the availability of different open sources and toolkits for building and as‐ for building
and assessing
sessing ASR. toolkits
ASR. These These toolkits are Hidden
are Hidden MarkovMarkov Model Toolkit
Model Toolkit (HTK), Carnegie
(HTK), Carnegie Mellon
Mellon University
University (CMU) engine,
(CMU) Sphinx Sphinx engine,
and KALDIand KALDI
Speech Speech Recognition
Recognition Toolkit.Toolkit.
SpeechSpeech
recog‐
recognition can be subdivided into four types [15], namely:
nition can be subdivided into four types [15], namely:
• Isolated
Isolated word
wordrecognition
recognitioninin which
which speakers
speakers pause
pause momentarily
momentarily between
between everyevery
spo‐
spoken
ken word;word;
• Continuous
Continuous speech
speech recognition
recognition allows
allows speakers
speakers to
to speak
speak almost
almost naturally,
naturally, with
with little
little
or no breaks between words. The systems related to the second
or no breaks between words. The systems related to the second type are moretype are more complex
than isolated word recognition and need large volumes of data to achieve excellent
recognition rates;
• Connected words allow a minimal pause between the isolated utterances to be
used together;
• Spontaneous speech remains normal-sounding and not conversational speech.
Each category of speech recognition can be further categorized according to two
sub-categories, namely:
complex than isolated word recognition and need large volumes of data to achieve
excellent recognition rates;
 Connected words allow a minimal pause between the isolated utterances to be used
together;
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898  Spontaneous speech remains normal‐sounding and not conversational speech. 4 of 22
Each category of speech recognition can be further categorized according to two sub‐
categories, namely:
1. Speaker-dependent,
1. Speaker‐dependent, in in which
which the the system
system is based only on the speech of a specific
speakerfor
speaker forwhich
whichthethesystem
systemisistrained
trained[21];
[21];
2. Speaker‐independentmeans
Speaker-independent means speech
speech recognition
recognition systemssystems
can becan
foundbeinfound in any
any speaker’s
speech [21].speech [21].
speaker’s
As
As presented
presented earlier,
earlier, this
thispaper
paperaims aimstotoreview
review andandanalyze
analyzethethe
existing studies
existing on
studies
automatic
on automaticspeech recognition
speech for the
recognition forArabic language.
the Arabic SevenSeven
language. fundamental research
fundamental ques‐
research
tions are tackled
questions to provide
are tackled insight,
to provide for instance,
insight, into the
for instance, intoused toolkits
the used for Arabic
toolkits ASRASR
for Arabic and
the
andapplied feature
the applied extraction
feature and and
extraction classification techniques.
classification The following
techniques. section
The following pre‐
section
sents these
presents questions
these questionsandanddetails thethe
details adopted
adoptedsearch method
search methodin this SLR.
in this SLR.
Method
3. Method
The systematic literature review was basedbased on
on the
the Preferred
Preferred Reporting
Reporting Items
Items for
for Sys‐
Sys-
tematic Reviews and Meta‐Analyses
Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol [22]. First, the research
research questions
are formulated, followed by the search strategy. Next, the inclusion and exclusion criteria
are presented.
are presented. Finally,
Finally, the
the quality
quality assessment
assessment and
and data
data extraction
extraction process
process are
are stated.
stated.
Figure 22 illustrates
Figure illustrates the
the PRISMA
PRISMA flow
flow chart
chart showing
showing aa report
report of
of the
the obtained
obtained outcomes
outcomes
in each
in each phase
phase for
for the
the current
current systematic
systematic literature
literature review
review of
of Arabic
Arabic Speech
Speech to
to Text.
Text.
Figure 2. PRISMA flow chart of the study selection.
3.1. Research
3.1. Research Questions
Questions (RQ)
(RQ)
The first step of this SLR consists of defining the research questions and Secondary
The first step of this SLR consists of defining the research questions and Secondary
Research Questions (SRQ). As presented earlier, the purpose is to review the Arabic ASR
Research Questions (SRQ). As presented earlier, the purpose is to review the Arabic ASR
studies conducted between 2011 and 2021. A total of seven RQs and three SRQs were
studies conducted between 2011 and 2021. A total of seven RQs and three SRQs were de‐
defined to carry out a detailed review of the field. The RQs and SRQs related to the
fined to carry out a detailed review of the field. The RQs and SRQs related to the purposes
purposes are as follows:
are as follows:
RQ 1.
RQ 1. What
What is
is the
the bibliographic
bibliographic information
information ofof the
the existing
existing studies?
studies?
• SRQ 1.1. What are the most active countries?
• SRQ 1.2. How has the number of studies evolved across the years?
• SRQ 1.3. What
What are
are the
the types
types of
of venues
venues (i.e.,
(i.e., journals,
journals, conferences,
conferences, or workshops)
workshops) used
by the authors of studies?
RQ 2. What is the considered variant of Arabic in speech recognition studies?
RQ 3. What are the toolkits most often used in the Arabic speech recognition field?
RQ 4. Which datasets were most often used, and types of Arabic speech recognition were
identified in these datasets?
RQ 5. What are the used feature extraction and classification techniques for Arabic speech
recognition studies?
RQ 6. What are the current gaps and future research in the Arabic ASR field?
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 5 of 22
RQ 7. What is the performance of Arabic recognition systems in terms of accuracy rate

or WER?
3.2. Search Strategy

3.2.1. Search Strings
We started our SLR by defining the main keywords used in the related research studies
and the research questions. To ensure a more comprehensive search, alternate synonyms,
acronyms, and spelling variations of words were included for the different keywords.
In the following, we divided the keywords into four categories. The Boolean operator
OR was used by combining the keywords in each category. Then, we used the Boolean
operator AND incorporated the keywords across the categories. Table 1 presents the
defined categories along with the keywords.
Table 1. Search terms.
Category 1 Category 2 Category 3 Category 4

Arabic Automat 1 Speech recogni 2 System
Arabic language Computer Speech trans 3 Technology
Multilingual Speech to text Tool
Voice to text
Voice recogniti 2
SRT 4
ASR
STT
1 Automated or automatic. 2 Recognition or recognizer. 3 Translator or transformation. 4 Speech recognition
technology.
The search string induced based on the keywords in each category is as follows:
• C1: “Arabic” OR “Arabic Language” OR “Multilingual”;
• C2: “Automat*” OR Computer”;
• C3: “Speech recogni*” OR “Speech trans*” OR “Speech to text” OR “Voice to text” OR
“Voice recogni*” OR “SRT” OR “ASR” OR “STT”;
• C4: “System” OR “Tool” OR “Technology”
The resulting string can be formulated as (C1) AND (C2) AND (C3) AND (C4). The
results of the search were then imported to Mendeley Reference Management Software.
3.2.2. Electronic Databases

Five electronic databases were used to collect data. These include ACM Digital Library,
ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, SpringerLink, and Google Scholar. Table 2 presents the used
electronic databases along with their links. In this study, the search was performed for
published journal papers, conferences, and workshop proceedings.
Table 2. List of used online electronic databases.
Database Source Link

Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/ (accessed on 1 August 2022)
ACM Digital Library https://dl.acm.org (accessed on 1 August 2022)
IEEE Xplore https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp (accessed on 1 August 2022)
Science Direct https://www.sciencedirect.com (accessed on 1 August 2022)
Springer Link https://link.springer.com/ (accessed on 1 August 2022)
Table 3 illustrates the procedure for conducting queries in each electronic database,
along with some notes.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 6 of 22
Table 3. Online electronic databases.
Databases Query String Notes

allintitle: (“Arabic” OR “Multilingual”) AND (“Speech recognition”
Custom range: 2011–2021
OR “Speech recognizer” OR “Speech transformation” OR “Speech
Google Scholar The number of characters per query is limited, so the
to text” OR “voice to text” OR “Voice recognition”) AND (“system”
shorter query was applied.
OR “technology”)
(“Arabic” OR “Arabic Language” OR “Multilingual”) AND
(“Automatic” OR “Automated” OR “Computer”) AND (“Speech
ACM Filter year: 2011–2021
recognition” OR “Speech recognizer” OR “Speech transformation”
Digital Document Type: research articles (295) and
OR “Speech to text” OR “voice to text” OR “Voice recognition” OR
Library journals (193).
“Voice recognizer” OR “SRT” OR “ASR” OR “STT”) AND (“system”
OR “tool” OR “technology”)
Filter year: 2011–2021
(“Automat*” OR “Computer”) AND (“Speech recogni*” OR
Document type: Conferences (473) and Journals (66).
IEEE Xplore “Speech trans*” OR “Speech to text” OR “voice to text” OR “Voice
IEEE Xplore recommends using short expressions. It
recogni*” OR “SRT” OR “ASR” OR “STT”) AND (“system” OR
does not work correctly with many disjunction terms.
“tool” OR “technology”)
Filter by article types: “Research articles (168).”
(“Arabic” OR “Multilingual”) AND (“Speech recogni” OR “Speech Filter by years: 2011–2021
Science
trans” OR “Speech to text” OR “voice to text” OR “Voice recogni”) The number of Boolean connectors is limited to 8 in the
Direct
AND (“system” OR “technology”) search. For this reason, we have used the shorter string
The wildcard ‘*’ is not supported
Two filters were applied to the result:
(“Automat” OR “Computer”) AND (“Speech recogni” OR “Speech
Language is English
Springer Link trans” OR “Speech to text” OR “voice to text” OR “Voice recogni”
Years: 2011–2021
OR “SRT” OR “ASR” OR “STT”) AND (“system” OR “tool”
Articles (189), conference papers (161)
OR “technology”)
3.3. Study Selection

A total of 1559 articles were retrieved from the search string presented in Table 3. We
added 9 papers from other overviews and surveys. Out of 1568 papers, 88 were duplicates,
and consequently, they were removed. A total of 1480 papers were retained after this step.
Then, the abstract, keywords, and title of all the papers were checked by one author referred
to as a reviewer. A total of 236 articles were retrieved after this step. In the following, a set
of inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to decide which research papers to review.
Table 4 illustrates the adopted inclusion and exclusion criteria. By applying these criteria,
the number of research papers was reduced further down to 127.
Table 4. Inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Inclusion Criteria Exclusion Criteria

Papers undertaking Arabic speech recognition. Papers venue is not journals, conferences, or workshops.
Papers focused only on spoken words in Arabic. Papers undertaking spoken Arabic digit recognition.
Papers directly answer one or more of the RQ. Papers not being available.
Published papers are between 2011 and 2021. Studies in duplicity.
Papers are written in English Theoretical papers.
Next, two reviewers were involved in checking anonymously if the papers addressed
one or more of the research questions presented previously in Section 3.1. In this way, the
papers unable to cover the research questions related to this SLR would not be retained.
In this step, the candidate papers were imported to a Web application called Rayyan [23],
using the RIS format. This Web application supports the collaboration of the authors of
systematic literature reviews by voting on papers based on the S/RQs criteria.
Three voting options can be used in the Rayyan application, namely: “exclude”,
“include”, and “maybe”.
• The papers with two “include” votes or one “maybe” and one “include” vote were retained.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 7 of 22
• The papers that received two “exclude” votes or one “maybe” and one “exclude” vote
were eliminated from the dataset.
• The papers that received two “maybe” votes or one “include” and one “exclude” vote
were resolved through discussion. In those cases, a deciding vote on including or
excluding the paper are made by the third reviewer.
Finally, the Quality Assessment (QA) of 41 candidate papers for inclusion was per-
formed. The quality assessment of papers is described in the next section.
3.4. Quality Assessment

During this step, the quality assessment of each candidate’s paper for inclusion was
carried out. The goal was to assess the quality and relevance of the papers’ contents. In this
SLR paper, the quality assessment procedure was based on the study of [24]. The following
quality assessment questions were proposed accordingly:
• QA 1. Are the research goals/aims clearly explained?
• QA 2. Does the technique/methodology in the research clearly describe?
• QA 3. Are all study questions answered?
• QA 4. Are the research findings reported?
• QA 5. Do the results of the study add to the speech recognition field?
• QA 6. Are the limitations of the current study adequately addressed?
Three-point scales were used to answer each QA question, namely “yes”, which was
given 1 point, “partially”, which was given 0.5 points, and “no”, which was given 0 points.
If the paper answers the QA question, it receives 1 point.
It scores 0.5 points if it partially addresses the QA question. In the case of a paper
that did not address the QA question, it receives 0. The quality assessment of the research
papers was performed by evaluating their quality against the QA questions. The answers
to the QA questions of all the papers are presented in Table 5. The total score was calculated
for each research study. A threshold was defined, such as if the total score was equal to
or greater than three, then the study was included. In the case when the research study
was less than three, then it was excluded. In this study, three papers were excluded. These
papers are highlighted in blue color as we can see from Table 5. At the end of this process,
the final number of studies to be retained was 38.
Table 5. Quality assessment of the candidate papers for inclusion and their characteristics.
Publication Type of QA questions

Ref Publication Title Sum
Year Venue
QA1 QA2 QA3 QA4 QA5 QA6
[25] A complete KALDI Recipe for building Arabic speech recognition systems 2014 Workshop 1 1 1 1 1 0 5
[26] A comparative study of Arabic speech recognition system in noisy environments 2021 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0 5
[27] Effect of characteristics of speakers on MSA ASR performance 2013 Conference 1 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 5
[28] An accurate HSMM-based system for Arabic phonemes recognition 2017 Conference 0.5 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 0 3
[29] Active learning for accent adaptation in Automatic Speech Recognition 2012 Workshop 1 0 0.5 0.5 0.5 0 2.5
[30] AALTO system for the 2017 Arabic multi-genre broadcast challenge 2017 Workshop 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 0 3
[31] Arabic corpus Implementation: Application to Speech Recognition 2018 Conference 1 1 0.5 0.5 1 0 4
[32] Arabic isolated word recognition system using hybrid feature extraction techniques and neural network 2017 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
[33] Arabic Speech Recognition System Based on MFCC and HMMs 2020 Journal 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 0 3.5
[34] Automatic speech recognition system for Tunisian dialect 2018 Journal 1 1 1 0.5 1 1 5.5
[35] Arabic Speech Recognition by End-to-End, Modular Systems, and Human 2021 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
[4] Constructing accurate and robust HMM/GMM models for an Arabic speech recognition system 2017 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 1 6
[36] Development of the Arabic Loria Automatic Speech Recognition system (ALASR) and its evaluation of Algerian dialect 2017 Journal 1 1 1 0.5 1 0.5 5
[37] Development of the MIT ASR system for the 2016 Arabic multi-genre broadcast challenge 2016 Workshop 1 0.5 1 1 0.5 0 4
[38] Diacritics Effect on Arabic Speech Recognition 2019 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0 5
[39] Hybrid continuous speech recognition systems by HMM, MLP, and SVM: a comparative study 2014 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0 5
[40] Graphical Models for the Recognition of Arabic continuous speech based Triphones modeling 2015 Conference 1 0.5 1 1 1 0 4.5
[41] Hybrid Arabic Speech Recognition System Using FFT, Fuzzy Logic, and Neural Network 2016 Journal 1 0.5 1 0.5 1 1 5
[42] Investigating the impact of phonetic cross language modeling on Arabic and English speech recognition 2014 Conference 0.5 0 1 0.5 0.5 0 2.5
[43] Lexicon Free Arabic Speech Recognition Recipe 2016 Conference 1 1 1 1 1 0 5
[44] Arabic Speech Recognition Using MFCC Feature Extraction and ANN Classification 2017 Conference 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 0 3.5
[45] Robust Front-End based on MVA processing for Arabic Speech Recognition 2017 Conference 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 0 3
[46] Selection and combination of hypotheses for dialectal speech recognition 2016 Conference 1 0 0.5 0.5 0.5 0 2.5
[47] Self-Supervised Speech Enhancement for Arabic Speech Recognition in Real-World Environments 2021 Journal 1 0 1 1 1 0 4
[1] TAMEEM V1.0: speakers and text independent Arabic automatic continuous speech recognizer 2017 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
[48] Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Recognition 2020 Conference 1 0.5 1 0.5 1 0 4
[49] Dynamic Time Warping Inside a Genetic Algorithm for Automatic Speech Recognition 2019 Conference 1 1 1 1 1 0 5
[50] Control Interface of an Automatic Continuous Speech Recognition System in Standard Arabic Language 2020 Conference 1 1 1 0 0.5 0 3.5
[51] The Effect of Diacritization on Arabic Speech Recognition 2017 Conference 1 0.5 1 1 1 0 4.5
[52] Toward enhanced Arabic speech recognition using part of speech tagging 2011 Journal 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 5
[53] Tunisian Dialectal End-to-end Speech Recognition based on Deep Speech 2021 Conference 1 1 1 0.5 1 0 4.5
[54] The impact of phonological rules on Arabic speech recognition 2017 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 8 of 22
Table 5. Cont.
Publication Type of QA questions

Ref Publication Title Sum
Year Venue
QA1 QA2 QA3 QA4 QA5 QA6
[55] Arabic speech Recognition using end-to-end deep learning 2021 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0 5
[56] Convolutional Neural Network for Arabic Speech Recognition 2021 Journal 1 1 1 0.5 1 0 4.5
[57] Automatic speech recognition of Arabic multi-genre broadcast media 2017 Conference 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
[58] Bidirectional deep architecture for Arabic speech recognition 2019 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0 5
[11] WERD: using social text spelling variants for evaluating dialectal speech recognition 2017 Conference 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 5
[59] LIUM ASR systems for the 2016 multi-genre Broadcast Arabic Challenge 2016 Workshop 1 1 0.5 1 0.5 0 4
[19] Arabic Isolated Word Speaker Dependent Recognition System 2016 Journal 1 1 1 1 1 0 5
[60] Speech Recognition of Isolated Arabic words via using Wavelet Transformation and Fuzzy Neural Network 2016 Journal 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 0 3.5
[61] Development of a TV Broadcasts Speech Recognition System for Qatari Arabic 2014 Conference 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
4. Results and Discussion

The 38 papers related to Arabic speech recognition constitute the dataset that will be
analyzed. Based on the research questions in Section 3.1, each study is analyzed using
the following criteria: feature techniques, type of Arabic language, toolkit, and speech
recognition. Table 6 presents the retained papers classified according to these criteria. The
important legends for Table 6 are as follows:
MLLT: Maximum Likelihood Linear Transform.
PLP: Perceptual Linear Predictive.
MLP: Multi-Layer Perceptron.
GMM: Gaussian Mixture Model.
PCA: Principal Component Analysis.
RASTA-PLP: Relative Spectral-Perceptual Linear prediction.
fMMLR: Feature Space Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression.
bMMI: Boosted Maximum Mutual Information.
SGMM: Subspace Gaussian Mixture Model.
DNN: Deep Neural Networks.
HSMM: Hidden Semi-Markov Model.
MPE: Minimum Phone Error.
TDNN: Time-Delay Neural Network.
LSTM: Long Short-Term Memory.
BLSTM: Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory.
FFBPNN: Feed-Forward Back Propagation Neural Network.
SVM: Support Vector Machine.
DBN: Dynamic Bayesian Networks.
BDRNN: Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network.
CTC: Connectionist Temporal Classification.
GLSTM: Guiding Long-Short Term Memory.
CHMM: Coupled Hidden Markov Model.
RNN: Recurrent Neural Network.
LPC: Linear Predictive Coding.
MFCC: Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient.
PCA: Principal Component Analysis.
ANN: Artificial Neural Network.
SAT-GMM: Speaker Adaptive Training Gaussian Mixture Model-Gaussian Mixture Model.
FFT: Fast Fourier Transform.
MFSC: Log Frequency Spectral Coefficients.
GFCC: Gammatone-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients.
WLPCCS: Weighted Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficients.
MAP: Maximum a Posterior Adaptation.
DTW: Dynamic Time Warping.
GMMD: Gaussian Mixture Model Derived.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 9 of 22
Table 6. Summary of the retained papers and their features.
Feature Techniques Type of Type of Speech Recognition Datasets

Ref Arabic Toolkits
Extraction Language Speaker
Classification Techniques Mode
Techniques Dependency
GMM, GMM-fMLLR,
A mix of 127 h of Broadcast
GMM-MPE, GMM-bMMI,
MADA, Continuous Speaker Conversations (BC) and
[25] MFCC+LDA+MLLT SGMM-fMLLR, MSA
KALDI speech independent 76 h of Broadcast
SGMM-bMMI, DNN,
Report (BR).
DNN-MPE
CMU A free Arabic Speech
Isolated Speaker
[26] MFCC GMM-HMM, DNN-HMM MSA Sphinx, Corpus for Isolated Words
words independent
KALDI dataset [62].
continuous Speaker The Algerian Arabic Speech
[27] MFCC HMM MSA HTK
speech independent Database (ALGASD) [63].
Isolated Classical Arabic letters
[28] MFCC HSMM, GMM MSA HTK N/A
words sound from Holy Quran.
The 3rd Multi-Genre
Broadcast challenge
MSA,
TDNN, TDNN-LSTM, Continuous Speaker (MGB-3): an enormous
[30] LDA Egyptian KALDI
TDNN-BLSTM words independent audio corpus of primarily
dialect
MSA speech and 5 h of
Egyptian data [64].
Continuous
MFCC, PLP, Tunisian and 21 recordings of 5 words of
[31] HMM HTK N/A
LPC dialect connected vocabulary.
words
MFCC, PLP,
Isolated Speaker 11 modern standard
[32] PCA, FFBPNN MSA N/A
words dependent Arabic words.
RASTA-PLP
Isolated 24 Arabic words
[33] MFCC HMM MSA MATLAB N/A
words Consonant-Vowel [33].
The Tunisian Arabic
Railway Interaction Corpus
PLP, LDA, Tunisian Continuous Speaker (TARIC). It contains
[34] GMM-HMM KALDI
MLLT, fMLLR dialect words independent information requests in the
Tunisian dialect about
railway services.
MSA,
Egyptian, Arabic Multi-Genre
Gulf, Continuous Speaker Broadcast corpus: MGB0F 1
[35] MFCC TDNN-LSTM KALDI
Levantine, words independent [65], MGB3 [64],
North and MGB5 [66].
African
A speech database
containing more than 8 h of
HTK, Isolated
[4] MFCC GMM-HMM MSA N/A speech recorded from the
MATLAB words
Holy Quran concerning
Tajweed rules.
MSA A corpus of Algerian
extended dialect sentences extracted
Isolated Speaker
[36] MFCC DNN-HMM to the KALDI from the Parallel Arabic
words independent
Algerian DIalect Corpus
dialect (PADIC) [67].
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 10 of 22
Table 6. Cont.

Ref Arabic Toolkits
A 1.200-h speech corpus
KALDI, Continuous was made available for the
LDA, MFCC, GMM, DNN, CNN, TDNN,
[37] MSA CNTK, speech N/A 2016 Arabic Multi-genre
MLLT, fMLLR H-LSTM, GLSTM
SRILM Broadcast (MGB)
Challenge 2 .
GMM-SI, GMM SAT, GMM The total length of the
MPE, GMM MMI, SGMM, KALDI, Isolated Speaker corpus is 23 h of 4754
[38] MFCC+LDA+MLLT MSA
SGMM-bMMI, DNN, SRILM words independent sentences with
DNN-MPE 193 speakers.
ARABIC_DB for large
HMM, MLP-HMM, Continuous
[39] MFCC MSA HTK N/A vocabulary continuous
SVM-HMM speech
Speech recognition [68]
HMM, Hybrid SVM-HMM Isolated
[40] MFCC MSA HTK N/A ARABIC_DB [68].
DBN, Hybrid SVM-DBN words
Fuzzy logic, Neural Isolated 2 Arabic
words.
[41] FFT MSA MATLAB N/A
network words ( ' @Qº, AJ.kQÓ)
8-h Aljazeera broadcast,

which was collected and
Filter bank, GMM-HMM, transcribed by Qatar
Continuous
[43] Neutral HMM-GMM-Tandem, MSA HTK N/A Computing Research
speech
network BDRNN, CTC Institute (QCRI) using an
advanced transcription
system [69].
Isolated 3 Arabic letters of sa ( ),

[44] MFCC ANN MSA HTK N/A
words ), sya ( ).
tsa ( H
MFCC,
Isolated Speaker
[45] RASTA-PLP, HMM MSA HTK 4 isolated Arabic words.
words dependent
PNCC
A free Arabic mobile
parallel multi-dialect
CMU Isolated Speaker
[47] DAE HMM MSA speech corpus containing
Sphinx words independent
15492 utterances from
12 speakers [70].
The corpus contains
CMU Continuous Speaker
[1] MFCC CHMM MSA recordings of
Sphinx recognition independent
415 Arabic sentences.
MSA, A corpus covering multiple
CMU Isolated
[48] MFCC CNN, RNN Egyptian, N/A dialects and
Sphinx words
Gulf different accents.
Corpus A is composed of
30 words.
MFCC, FFT, Isolated Speaker
[49] DTW, Genetic algorithm MSA MATLAB Corpus B is recorded in a
Filter Bank words independent
natural environment
containing 33 words.
The ALGerian Arabic
Continuous Speaker
[50] N/A HMM MSA HTK Speech Database
speech independent
(ALGASD) [63].
CMU Continuous Broadcast news from
[51] N/A N/A MSA N/A
Sphinx speech As-Sabah TV.
CMU Continuous A 5.4-h speech corpus of
[52] N/A N/A MSA N/A
Sphinx speech MSA.
Tunisian dialect paired
Dialectal Continuous speech collection”
[53] MFCC DNN, RNN KenLM N/A
Tunisian words TunSpeech”
consisting of 11 h.
CMU Continuous Broadcast news
[54] N/A HMM MSA N/A
Sphinx speech using MSA.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 11 of 22
Table 6. Cont.

Ref Arabic Toolkits
51 thousand words that
MFCC, Isolated Speaker required seven hours of
[55] CNN-LSTM MSA KALDI
FBANK words independent recording via a single
young male speaker
Librosa,
Spafe, 9992 utterances of 20 words
Isolated Speaker
[56] MFSC, GFCC CNN MSA Keras, spoken by 50 native male
Words independent
Tensor- Arabic speakers.
flow
MSA,
Egyptian,
CNTK,
MFCC, LDA, DNN, TDNN, LSTM, Gulf, Continuous Speaker An Egyptian
[57] KALDI,
MLLT, fMLLR BLSTM Levantine, speech independent broadcast data.
SRILM
North
African
Mel Frequency, Isolated Speaker Arabic TV commands
[58] LSTM, MLP MSA N/A
Filter Bank words independent and digits.
2 h of Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Continuous
[11] MFCC TDNN, LSTMs, BiLSTMs KALDI N/A A broadcast news
dialect words
speech data.
(PLP, BN,
GMMD) + MADAMIRA, Continuous Speaker 1128 h of Arabic
[59] DNN, SAT-GMM, TDNN MSA
(i-vectors, KALDI speech independent broadcast speech.
fMLLR, MAP)
Praat, Isolated Speaker
[19] MFCC, LPC DTW, GMM MSA 40 Arabic words.
MATLAB word dependent
LPC, LPCS, Neural Network, Isolated Speaker
[60] MSA MATLAB 10 isolated Arabic words.
WLPCCS Neuro-Fuzzy Network words independent
MSA,
fMLLR, LDA, Continuous Speaker Different TV series and talk
[61] GMM-HMM Qatari KALDI
MLLT speech independent show programs.
dialect
1 The abbreviation that refers to the Multi-Genre Broadcast. 2 http://www.mgb-challenge.org/arabic.html
(accessed on 1 August 2022).
4.1. RQ1: What Is the Bibliographic Information of the Existing Studies?

4.1.1. SRQ1.1. What Are the Most Active Countries?
Table 7 presents the number of papers related to MSA and DA contributed by each
country of the first author. The analysis illustrates that the first authors of seven papers
are from Tunisia, with four studies dedicated to MSA and three to the Tunisian dialect.
Algeria is second with five research papers, while Qatar is third with four papers. Two
countries, namely Morocco and Kuwait, had three studies each. The research focus in these
two countries was specifically on MSA. France, Jordan, and Malaysia had two research
studies each. Lastly, eleven countries (i.e., Libya, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Finland, Spain,
Indonesia, USA, UK, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq) had one study each. Based on our analysis, it
is noticed that most of the studies related to DA focus on the Egyptian dialect (five out of
ten studies explicitly dedicated to dialectal Arabic). It can be noted that the Egyptian dialect
is considered the first-ranked DA in terms of the number of speakers in the Arab world.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 12 of 22
Table 7. The most active countries according to the retained studies. Some studies support more
than one type of Arabic. Then, the same study was repeated, which increased the number of studies
related to MSA/DA.
Studies
Countries of the Studies Related to Total Number
Related to
First Author Dialect Arabic of Studies
MSA
Morocco 3 0 3
3 (Qatari, Egyptian,
Qatar 4 Gulf/Levantine, 4
/North African/Egyptian)
Finland 1 1 (Egyptian) 1
Palestine 1 0 1
Tunisia 4 3 (Tunisian) 7
Libya 1 0 1
Saudi Arabia 1 0 1
France 2 1 (Algerian) 2
1 (Egyptian/Gulf, Levantine/North
USA 1 1
African)
Kuwait 3 0 3
Jordan 2 0 2
Spain 1 0 1
Indonesia 1 0 1
Algeria 5 0 5
UK 1 1 (Egyptian/Gulf) 1
Yemen 1 0 1
Egypt 1 0 1
Iraq 1 0 1
4.1.2. SRQ1.2. How Has the Number of Papers Evolved?

Figure 3 illustrates the distribution of Arabic speech recognition studies per publication
years, types, and variants of Arabic language and dialects. The vertical columns present the
number of published research papers per year. As we can see from the figure, the number
of research studies on Arabic speech recognition systems has increased since 2016.
4.1.3. SRQ1.3. What Are the Types of Venues Used by the Authors of the Studies?
The total number of retained studies is 38. As we can see from Figure 3, a total of
19 studies were published in journals, 15 studies were presented at conferences, and
4 studies were presented in workshops.
4.2. RQ2. What Is the Considered Variant of Arabic in Speech Recognition Studies?
In this section, we describe the types or variants of Arabic adopted by the reviewed
studies. As we can see from Figure 3, the recognition of MSA has piqued the interest
of several researchers. Among the 38 reviewed studies, 34 of them cover MSA (89.47%
of the retained studies), whereas 10 of the retained studies were dedicated to different
dialects of Arabic (26.32% of the reviewed studies). Note that some studies can be ded-
icated to more than one variant of Arabic. The studies dedicated for MSA include, for
example, [4,25–28,30,32,33,35,37–40,43]. Some of these studies cover MSA along with other
dialectal Arabic, such as the Algerian dialect [36] (1 study out of 38), the Qatari dialect [61]
(1 study out of 38), and the Egyptian dialect (4 studies out of 38) [30]. It can also be observed
that some Arabic dialects were not supported by retained studies such as the Iraqi and
Yemeni dialects.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, x FOR PEER REVIEW 16 of 26
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 13 of 22
Figure 3.
Figure 3. Distribution
Distribution of
of Arabic
Arabic speech
speech recognition
recognition studies
studies per
per publication
publication years,
years, types,
types, and
and variants
variants of
of Arabic
Arabic language
language and
and dialects.
dialects. Some
Some studies
studies support
support more
more
than one
than onevariant
variantof
ofArabic
Arabicand
andcan
canfocus
focusononmulti-dialects
multi‐dialectsofofArabic.
Arabic. Accordingly,
Accordingly, thethe same
same study
study hashas
beenbeen repeated,
repeated, which
which increases
increases the the
totaltotal number
number of studies
of studies per
per type
type of Arabic
of Arabic language.
language.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 14 of 22
4.3. RQ 3. What Are the Toolkits Most Often Used in the Arabic Speech Recognition Field?
Across the retained studies, researchers have used different toolkits to support im-
plementing and evaluating Arabic speech recognition systems. Two studies have not
mentioned the toolkit used [32,58]. Most of the retained studies have either used KALDI or
CMU Sphinx, or HTK toolkits. The study of [1] used the CMU Sphinx toolkit to evaluate
the speech corpus. The author claimed that there are many technical differences between
CMU sphinx and HTK tools. These include (1) CMU Sphinx has more advanced features
compared to HTK; (2) HTK toolkit is more user-friendly than CMU Sphinx; (3) CMU Sphinx
is often better than HTK, mainly in terms of accuracy rate.
According to Abushariah [1], the CMU Sphinx toolkit is more suitable to be used,
particularly for speaker-independent, extensive vocabulary, and continuous speech recogni-
tion systems. The CMU sphinx along with HTK toolkits are suitable to be used for training
acoustic models due to their abilities to implement speaker-independent, large vocabulary,
continuous speech recognition systems in any language [10,71,72]. However, it is noticed
based on Table 6 that the CMU Sphinx and HTK tools were used to support isolated words
in a few studies such as [26] and [40], respectively.
Other different toolkits such as SRILM language modeling were used in [37]. The
previous study was based on the KALDI speech recognition toolkit to build and evaluate
acoustic models and CNTK to train acoustic models. The KALDI toolkit was used as
well in many other research studies such as [25,34–36,61]. Most of these studies were
proposed to support dialectal Arabic. Some other research efforts such as [19,33,41,49,60]
used MATLAB, a closed-source software. All these speech recognizers were dedicated
mainly to MSA, particularly to the MSA isolated words category. Few of the retained
studies have used other toolkits such as MADA [25] and KenLM [53].
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, x FOR PEER REVIEW 18 of 26
Figure 4 illustrates the frequency of use of each toolkit according to the variant
of Arabic.
18
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
KALDI HTK CMU Sphinx MATLAB Others
Modern Speech Arabic Dialect Arabic
Figure4.4.Frequency
Figure Frequencyofofuse
useofoftoolkits
toolkitsaccording
accordingtotothe
theused
usedtype
typeofofArabic.
Arabic.Some
Somestudies
studieswere
werebased
based
on more than one toolkit. Then, the same study was repeated, which increased the total numberof
on more than one toolkit. Then, the same study was repeated, which increased the total number
studies.
of studies.
4.4.
4.4.RQ
RQ4.4.Which
WhichDatasets
DatasetsWere
WereMost
MostOften
OftenUsed,
Used,and
andWhat
WhatTypes
TypesofofArabic
ArabicSpeech
SpeechRecognition
Were Identified
Recognition in These
Were Datasets?
Identified in These Datasets?
AsAswewecan
cansee
seefrom
fromTable
Table6,6,most
mostofofthe
thedatasets
datasetswere
wereused
usedonly
onlyonce.
once.Examples
Examplesofof
these
these datasets are TunSpeech and TARIC. A limited number of studies were adoptedon
datasets are TunSpeech and TARIC. A limited number of studies were adopted on
the
thesame
samedataset.
dataset.For Forinstance,
instance,two
twostudies,
studies,namely
namely[27,50],
[27,50],were
werebased
basedononthe
theAlgerian
Algerian
Arabic
Arabicspeech
speechdatabase
database[63].
[63].The
TheArabic
Arabicmulti-genre
multi‐genrebroadcast
broadcastdatasets
datasetswere
werealso
alsoadopted
adopted
by three studies, namely [30,35,37].
by three studies, namely [30,35,37].
Among the retained studies, two main modes of speech recognition have been sup‐
ported, namely isolated words and continuous words. The following subsections describe
the existing studies according to each of these modes.
4.4.1. Isolated Words

Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 15 of 22
Among the retained studies, two main modes of speech recognition have been sup-
ported, namely isolated words and continuous words. The following subsections describe
the existing studies according to each of these modes.
4.4.1. Isolated Words

Within the retained studies, 19 were dedicated to the isolated words category. For
this category, studies including [19,26,32,33,40,41,45,47–49,58,60] were directed towards
recognizing MSA. Some other studies for the isolated words category have contributed
to MSA along with dialect Arabic such as [48], which focused on two variants of dialect
Arabic (i.e., Egyptian and Gulf).
4.4.2. Continuous Words

Based on the data extracted from the 38 retained studies, all the research contributions
for continuous words focused on recognizing speech from broadcast news or broadcasted
reports, or conversations. These studies include, for example, [11,25,35,37,51,54,57,59,61]
as shown in Table 6. Furthermore, the research contributions toward continuous Arabic
words for speech-independent are more than what we have seen for speech-dependent,
which makes sense as most of the continuous speech systems are dedicated to recognizing
broadcast news/conversions. Among these studies, we can cite [25,59].
4.5. RQ 5. What Are the Used Feature Extraction and Classification Techniques for Arabic Speech
Recognition Studies?
Results show that a wide range of feature techniques was used in Arabic speech
recognition systems (see Table 6). These techniques can be classified into two categories:
(1) feature extraction and (2) classification techniques. The following sub-sections present
the retained studies according to these two categories.
4.5.1. Feature Extraction Techniques

The analysis of the retained studies shows that the MFCC acoustic feature extraction
technique was the most used. A total of 24 studies out of 38 were based on the MFCC
technique, which constitutes 63% of the reviewed papers. Other studies were based on
alternate speech feature extraction methods, for instance, Linear prediction coefficient (LPC)
(8% of the reviewed studies). Table 8 illustrates the commonly used feature extraction
techniques, the percentage of their use, and the studies that were based on these techniques.
As shown in this Table, 10% of the studies were based on the PLP technique, and 18%
were based on the LDA technique. Some researchers have adopted a combination between
MFCC and other feature extraction methods, such as [19,32], and they achieved better
accuracy results than others.
Table 8. The commonly used extraction techniques. Some studies are based on more than one
technique. Then, the same study was repeated, which increased the total number of studies.
Used Techniques Percentage References

fMLLR 13% [34,37,38,57,59,61]
MFCC 63% [1,4,11,19,25–28,31–33,35–40,44,45,48,49,53,55,57]
LDA 18% [25,30,34,37,38,57,61]
LPC 8% [19,31,60]
PLP 10% [31,32,34,59]
4.5.2. Feature Classification Techniques

Table 9 shows the most common feature classification techniques used in the retained
papers. Different studies adopt the HMM as a feature classification technique, which
constituted 21% of the reviewed studies. Other research efforts have been based on a hybrid
of the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), especially for
continuous speech recognition. In this case, the HMM was used to identify the temporal
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 16 of 22
variability of speech while the Gaussian Mixture Model was applied to define how HMM
states fit the frame acoustic input. As shown in Table 9, 13% of the retained studies were
based on the combination of GMM-HMM.
Table 9. The commonly used classification techniques.
Used Techniques Percentage References

HMM 21% [27,31,33,45,47,50,54]
GMM-HMM 13% [4,26,34,43,61]
4.6. RQ 6. What Are the Current Gaps and Future Research in the Arabic ASR Field?
Despite the successful applications of Arabic speech recognition in different areas,
there are still many gaps and limitations. One of the main limitations addressed in the
studies focusing on DA is the minimal number of large datasets for dialect speech. It is
known in the speech recognition community that preparing large training datasets for
DA acoustic modeling is too tricky compared to MSA. It has been noticed that many of
the retained studies were based on a small corpus. Using common datasets can be a cost-
effective and possible way to gradually enhance the research area since the results can be
compared and enhanced. Few speech datasets are publicly available for Arabic dialects,
such as Spoken Tunisian Arabic Corpus (STAC) (It consists of five transcribed hours
obtained from different Tunisian TV radios and channels TV) [73], MGB-3 (It emphasizes
dialectal Arabic using a multi-genre collection of Egyptian YouTube videos), etc.
The adoption of a manual diacritized corpus and the lack of diacritized text remain
significant limitations in many studies [38,51]. One adopted solution for the latter limitation
consists of using grapheme units instead of the phoneme, which are the natural units
of speech. Additionally, some software, such as Apptek, has been used for automatic
diacritization of an Arabic corpus [10].
Aside from the limitations mentioned above, it should be noted that most of the
selected studies focus on the non-diacritized Arabic scripts instead of a diacritized version.
Only 6 studies out of 38 have been focused on diacritized Arabic speech [38,48,51,52,54,55].
A possible explanation is that the diacritized version of Arabic scripts may decrease the
accuracy compared with the non-diacritized version, which prompts researchers to focus
especially on non-diacritized scripts.
In terms of the techniques used for implementing speech recognition models, it was
observed that the use of deep learning techniques (e.g., neural networks, recurrent neural
networks, deep neural networks, etc.) is effective in increasing the accuracy of ASR.
However, limited studies have been based on these techniques compared to the ones
using alternative feature techniques. It is essential to highlight that using deep learning
techniques requires many corpora to train a model. As already presented, a very limited
common large corpus exists, which explains and is in line with the restricted number of
studies using deep learning techniques. More practice-led research is needed to build more
common large datasets for both MSA and dialectal Arabic.
Furthermore, many studies have claimed that the pronunciation variation phenomenon
represents an additional challenge to ASR systems. A possible solution consists of adopting
data extracted from pronunciation dictionaries to create rules, which enable the gener-
ation of pronunciation variants. Another possible solution is to estimate variants using
speech data. The prominent approach that can be adopted for modeling pronunciation
is the decision tree. The study of [74], for instance, was based on this approach to avoid
over-generation pronunciation and pronunciation variant generation. According to Loots
and Niesler [75], a decision tree is a practical approach to producing pronunciation variants
by generalizing the pronunciation.
4.7. RQ 7. What Is the Performance of Arabic Speech Recognition Systems?

The performance of ASR is typically defined in terms of accuracy and speed. Accuracy
is usually rated with the word error rate, whereas speed is estimated with the real-time
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 17 of 22
factor. In this section, the analysis of studies is presented based on RQ4 and RQ5. Table 10
summarizes the performance of each of the retained Arabic ASR. It can be noted that
excellent performances on the ASR proposed, for instance, by [41,60], have been achieved
using deep learning techniques.
Table 10. Performance of the retained Arabic speech recognition systems.
References Performance
[25] The obtained WER scored 15.81% on BR and 32.21% on a broadcast conversation.
The best WER for clean data was 96.2%. It was obtained
[26] with 256 mixtures per state. For the noisy data test, the best WER was 49.2% average for SNR levels under babble
noise obtained with 256 mixtures.
[27] The WER was 9%.
The overall system accuracy was 98%, and it was enhanced by around 1% by implementing HSMM instead of
[28]
standard HMM to reach 99%.
The obtained WER was 13.2% on the MGB2 test.
[30]
The obtained WER was 37.5% on MGB3.
The obtained average accuracy rate was 91.56% by using MFCC.
[31] The obtained average accuracy rate was 95.34% by using PLP.
The obtained average accuracy rate was 86.15% by using LPC.
[32] The WER reached 0.26% when using a combination of RASTA-PLP, PCA, and FFBPNN techniques.
The obtained accuracy was 92.92%.
[33]
The obtained WER was 7.08%.
[34] The obtained WER was 22.6% on the test set.
[35] The ASR achieved 12.5% WER on MGB2. It achieved 27.5% WER on MGB3 and 33.8% WER on MGB5.
The recognition rate reached 95.5% for system 1.
[4] The recognition rate reached 94% for system 2.
The recognition rate reached 97% for system 3.
The WER was 14.02% for MSA.
[36]
The WER was 89% for the Algerian dialect.
[37] The overall WER was 18.3%.
The WER scored 4.68%.
[38]
Adding diacritics increased WER by 0.59.
[39] The lowest average of WER was 11.42% for SVM/HMM, 11.92% for MLP/HMM, and 13.42% for HMM standards.
The use of HMM led to a recognition rate of 74.18%. The hybridization of MLP with HMM led to a recognition
rate of 77.74%.
[40]
The combination of SVM with HMM led to a recognition rate of 78.06%.
The hybridization of SVM with DBN realized the best performance, which was 87.6%.
[41] The achieved accuracy was 98%.
[43] The obtained WER ranged between 3.9% and 55%.
The average accuracy is 92.42%, with recognition
[44]
accuracy of each letter (sa ( ), sya ( ), tsa ( H
)) at 92.38%, 93.26%, and 91.63%, respectively.
[45] The obtained accuracy ranged between 97.26% and 98.95%.
[47] The WER ranged between 30.17% and 34.65%.
The average WER was 2.22% for speakers independent of the text-dependent data set.
[1]
The achieved average WER was 7.82% for speakers independent with text-independent data set.
[48] The system has achieved an overall WER of 14%.
The best recognition rate given by the system is 79% for multi-speaker recognition and 65% for independent
[49]
speaker recognition.
The performance of the ACSRS setup gave the region of Algiers a recognition rate of 97.74% for words and 94.67%
[50]
for sentences.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 18 of 22
Table 10. Cont.
References Performance
The WER scored 76.4% for the non-diacritized
[51]
text system and 63.8% for the diacritized text-based system.
[52] The obtained accuracy was 90.18%.
[53] The best performance achieved was 24.4% of WER.
The experimental results show that the non-diacritized text system scored 81.2%, while the diacritized text-based
[54]
system scored 69.1%.
The achieved result is 31.10% WER using the standard CTC-attention method. For CNN-LSTM with the attention
[55]
method, the best result is obtained from this model: 28.48% as WER.
Accuracy when using GFCC with CNN was 99.77%.
[56]
The maximum accuracy obtained when using GFCC with CNN was 99.77%.
The best WER obtained on MGB-3 using a 4-g re-scoring strategy is 42.25% for a BLSTM system, compared to
[57]
65.44% for a DNN system.
[58] For TV commands, accuracy is over 95% for all models.
The WER is much higher on the dialectal Arabic dataset, ranging from 40% to 50%.
[11]
The WER for the proposed ASR system using all five references achieved a score of 25.3%.
The final system was a combination of five systems where the result obtained succeeded the best single LIUM
[59] ASR system with a 9% of WER reduction and succeeded the baseline MGB system that the organizers provided
with a 43% WER reduction.
[19] The system accuracy reached 94.56%.
The recognition rate of trained data reached 97.8%.
[60]
The recognition rate of non-trained data reached 81.1%.
[61] The proposed ASR achieved a 28.9% relative reduction in WER.
In terms of the used datasets, it was found that the larger the speech corpus size used
to train the recognizer, the better the accuracy and the lower the WER. In [38], for example,
the authors claim that the WER continuously decreases as the corpus size increases. As
presented in Section 4.6, the speech recognition system using the non-diacritics dataset can
achieve better performance than the non-diacritics version.
In [38], Abed et al. examined the effect of diacritization on Arabic ASR. The authors
used diacritized and non-diacritized versions and checked how diacritics could impact the
word error rate. In all their results (except a few models with few corpora), the diacritics
increased WER for the used models. Additionally, in [51], the experimental results show
that the word error rate scored 76.4% for the non-diacritized text system, while it scored
63.8% for the diacritized text-based system. It can also be noticed that better accuracy is
achieved with speaker-dependent systems compared to speaker-independent systems since
the former is adapted to an individual user. According to [38], speaker-independent systems
might struggle when a new user uses the ASR system. In [1], for instance, Abushariah
conducted two experiments with and without an adaptation to the speakers using different
sentences. In their results, the obtained average WER was 7.64% for speaker-dependent,
whereas the average WER for speaker-independent was 7.82%.
To summarize, the overall performance of ASR systems depends significantly on
different factors, mainly the used datasets, the techniques for acoustic modeling, and the
type of speech recognition. Accordingly, building a precise acoustic model using large
datasets can be considered the key to suitable recognition performance.
5. Conclusions
This paper aims to compile the existing scientific knowledge about Arabic ASR studies
published between 2011 and 2021. For that, a systematic review of the literature is con-
ducted. A total of 38 conferences, workshops, and articles papers were reviewed from five
academic databases: Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, Science Direct, ACM Digital Library,
and Springer Link. Our results and discussion revolve around seven fundamental research
questions. The purposes were to provide insight into the used toolkits for implementing
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 19 of 22
and evaluating Arabic ASR, the variants of the Arabic language, the used feature extraction
and classification techniques, the performance of Arabic ASR systems, the type of speech
recognition, the existing gaps, and future research in the Arabic ASR field.
Our findings illustrate that this is still an emerging research area where the number
of studies has increased over the years. Many studies focus on MSA, whereas a relatively
limited number of papers concentrate on dialectal Arabic. Some of these papers were
dedicated to more than one variant of Arabic, and the reviewed studies did not support
different dialects of the Arabic language. It would be interesting to focus on DA and use
common datasets for dialect speech to enhance this research area gradually. Many toolkits
were used to build and assess Arabic ASR. The most prominent ones were KALDI, HTK,
and CMU Sphinx open-source toolkits. Concerning the used feature extraction techniques,
MFCC was the most used one, followed by LDA, then PLP, and LPC. The results show
also that HMM was the most adopted classification technique in the reviewed studies.
Different limitations have also been addressed in the reviewed studies. The pronunciation
variation phenomenon and the low availability of common large diacritized text for the
Arabic language can be considered significant challenges that might limit research in this
field. It would be interesting then to focus on the non-diacritized Arabic scripts and to
develop more large and common datasets for both MSA and dialectal Arabic.
Author Contributions: Conceptualization, A.D. and A.O.; methodology, A.D. and A.O.; software,
A.D., A.O. and O.E.G.; validation, A.D., A.O. and O.E.G.; formal analysis, A.D.; investigation, A.D.;
resources, A.D.; data curation, A.D.; writing—original draft preparation, A.D.; writing—review
and editing, A.D., A.O., O.E.G., M.K.K. and A.A.S.; visualization, A.O.; supervision, A.O.; project
administration, A.O.; funding acquisition, A.O. and A.A.S. All authors have read and agreed to the
published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This article was funded by the Mada Innovation Program (MIP’2021–2022) at Mada
Center, Qatar.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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Mada Center, Doha P.O. Box 24230, Qatar

Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898. https://doi.org/10.3390/app12178898 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci

Figure 2. PRISMA flow chart of the study selection.

RQ 7. What is the performance of Arabic recognition systems in terms of accuracy rate

3.2. Search Strategy

Table 1. Search terms.

Category 1 Category 2 Category 3 Category 4

3.2.2. Electronic Databases

Table 2. List of used online electronic databases.

Database Source Link

Table 3. Online electronic databases.

Databases Query String Notes

3.3. Study Selection

Table 4. Inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Inclusion Criteria Exclusion Criteria

3.4. Quality Assessment

Publication Type of QA questions

Publication Type of QA questions

4. Results and Discussion

Table 6. Summary of the retained papers and their features.

Feature Techniques Type of Type of Speech Recognition Datasets

Feature Techniques Type of Type of Speech Recognition Datasets

8-h Aljazeera broadcast,

Isolated 3 Arabic letters of sa ( ),

Feature Techniques Type of Type of Speech Recognition Datasets

4.1. RQ1: What Is the Bibliographic Information of the Existing Studies?

4.1.2. SRQ1.2. How Has the Number of Papers Evolved?

Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8898 13 of 22

Modern Speech Arabic Dialect Arabic

4.4.1. Isolated Words

4.4.1. Isolated Words

4.4.2. Continuous Words

4.5.1. Feature Extraction Techniques

Used Techniques Percentage References

4.5.2. Feature Classification Techniques

Table 9. The commonly used classification techniques.

Used Techniques Percentage References

4.7. RQ 7. What Is the Performance of Arabic Speech Recognition Systems?

Table 10. Performance of the retained Arabic speech recognition systems.

Table 10. Cont.

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Isolated 3 Arabic letters of sa ( ),