The aim of this thesis is to investigate a number of factors that could affect the performance of an Arabic automatic speech understanding (ASU) system. The work described in this thesis belongs to the speech recognition (ASR) phase, but the fact that it is part of an ASU project rather than a stand-alone piece of work on ASR influences the way in which it will be carried out. Our main concern in this work is to determine the best way to exploit the phonological properties of the Arabic language in order to improve the performance of the speech recogniser. One of the main challenges facing the processing of Arabic is the effect of the local context, which induces changes in the phonetic representation of a given text, thereby causing the recognition engine to misclassifiy it. The proposed solution is to develop a set of language-dependent grapheme-to-allophone rules that can predict such allophonic variations and eventually provide a phonetic transcription that is sensitive to the local context for the ASR system. The novel aspect of this method is that the pronunciation of each word is extracted directly from a context-sensitive phonetic transcription rather than a predened dictionary that typically does not reect the actual pronunciation of the word. Besides investigating the boundary effect on pronunciation, the research also seeks to address the problem of Arabic's complex morphology. Two solutions are proposed to tackle this problem, namely, using underspecified phonetic transcription to build the system, and using phonemes instead of words to build the hidden markov models (HMMS). The research also seeks to investigate several technical settings that might have an effect on the system's performance. These include training on the sub-population to minimise the variation caused by training on the main undifferentiated population, as well as investigating the correlation between training size and performance of the ASR system.

abstract: Learning to read in English is difficult for adult English language learners due to their diverse background, their level of experience with literacy in their first language, and their reason and desire for wanting to learn to read in English. Teachers of adult language learners must consider the educational and language experiences of adults enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in order to provide adequate learning opportunities for a diverse student body. Promoting learning opportunities for adult Arabic speakers was an area of interest for me when I first began teaching adult English language learners six years ago. The purpose of my action research study was to provide the adult Arabic speakers in my classroom with strategies they could use in order to read accurately in English. Current research used to guide my study focused on the difficulties Arabic speakers have with the orthographic features of the English language. As I conducted various cycles of action research in an ESL reading class, I developed an intervention to support adult Arabic speakers gain an understanding of the sound spelling system of the English language inclusive of instructional strategies to support accurate word reading. Data was collected to identify the individuals experience in learning to read. I included a pre and post miscue analysis to help identify the common error patterns of the participants of my study. Over an eight-week period, I followed a constructivist approach and facilitated word sorts to help students identify common sound spellings found in the English language. Instructional strategies were included to help the participants decode multisyllabic words by bringing awareness to the syllable types found in the English language. The findings of my study revealed that Arabic speakers benefited from an intervention focused on the sound spellings and syllabication of the English language. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2020