Syntactic Features for Arabic Speech Recognition

We report word error rate improvements with syntactic features using a neural probabilistic language model through N-best re-scoring. The syntactic features we use include exposed head words and their non-terminal labels both before and after the predicted word. Neural network LMs generalize better to unseen events by modeling words and other context features in continuous space. They are suitable for incorporating many different types of features, including syntactic features, where there is no pre-defined back-off order. We choose an N-best re-scoring framework to be able to take full advantage of the complete parse tree of the entire sentence. Using syntactic features, along with morphological features, improves the word error rate (WER) by up to 5.5% relative, from 9.4% to 8.6%, on the latest GALE evaluation test set.