[2604.06191] Harf-Speech: A Clinically Aligned Framework for Arabic Phoneme-Level Speech Assessment

Electrical Engineering and Systems Science > Audio and Speech Processing arXiv:2604.06191 (eess) [Submitted on 11 Mar 2026] Title:Harf-Speech: A Clinically Aligned Framework for Arabic Phoneme-Level Speech Assessment Authors:Asif Azad, MD Sadik Hossain Shanto, Mohammad Sadat Hossain, Bdour Alwuqaysi, Sabri Boughorbel, Yahya Bokhari, Abdulrhman Aljouie, Ayah Othman Sindi, Ehsan Hoque View a PDF of the paper titled Harf-Speech: A Clinically Aligned Framework for Arabic Phoneme-Level Speech Assessment, by Asif Azad and 8 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Automated phoneme-level pronunciation assessment is vital for scalable speech therapy and language learning, yet validated tools for Arabic remain scarce. We present Harf-Speech, a modular system scoring Arabic pronunciation at the phoneme level on a clinical scale. It combines an MSA phonetizer, a fine-tuned speech-to-phoneme model, Levenshtein alignment, and a blended scorer using longest common subsequence and edit-distance metrics. We fine-tune three ASR architectures on Arabic phoneme data and benchmark them with zero-shot multimodal models; the best, OmniASR-CTC-1B-v2, achieves 8.92\% phoneme error rate. Three certified speech-language pathologists independently scored 40 utterances for clinical validation. Harf-Speech attains a Pearson correlation of 0.791 and ICC(2,1) of 0.659 with mean expert scores, outperforming existing end-to-end assessment frameworks. These results show Harf-Speech yields clini...