Self-Supervised Speech Enhancement for Arabic Speech Recognition in Real-World Environments

Mobile speech recognition attracts much attention in the ubiquitous context, however, background noises, speech coding, and transmission errors are prone to corrupt the incoming speech. Therein, building a robust speech recognizer requires the availability of a large number of real-world speech samples. Arabic language, like many other languages, lacks such resources; to overcome this limitation, we propose a speech enhancement step, before the recognition begins. For the speech enhancement purpose, we suggest the use of a deep autoencoder (DAE) algorithm. A two-step procedure is suggested: in the first step, an overcomplete DAE is trained in an unsupervised way, and in the second one, a denoising DAE is trained in a supervised way leveraging the clean speech produced in the previous step. Experimental results performed on a real-life mobile database confirmed the potentials of the proposed approach and show a reduction of the WER (Word Error Rate) of a ubiquitous Arabic speech recognizer. Further experiments show an improvement of the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), and the short-time objective intelligibility (STOI) as well.