arXiv subjects

Yahya Bokhari

Publications and source records attributed to Yahya Bokhari.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

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

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 clinically aligned, interpretable scores comparable to inter-rater expert agreement.

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arXiv2026

Digital Harf: A Clinically Integrated Multimodal AI System for Pervasive Arabic Speech and Language Therapy

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Arabic-speaking countries face compounded barriers to effective speech and language therapy: a shortage of qualified specialists, limited service reach beyond urban centers, and a near-total absence of culturally grounded digital therapy materials. We present Digital Harf, a pervasive, multimodal AI platform that extends clinician-led speech and language therapy into the home. The system integrates three therapeutic modules - language therapy, speech intelligibility, and picture description - within a unified workflow that adapts to each child's performance over time. To address the critical shortage of Arabic therapy content, we introduce an Agentic Synthetic Data Engine (ASDE) that automatically generates culturally relevant images, prompts, and language tasks guided by explicit therapeutic and cultural criteria. Expert evaluation with 13 licensed Speech-Language Pathologists yielded a 90.1% clinical acceptance rate for ASDE-generated content without any manual curation or selection, and strong ratings for cultural and linguistic alignment across the full platform. Digital Harf demonstrates that AI-driven therapeutic systems can be built from the ground up for underrepresented linguistic settings, treating cultural grounding as core infrastructure rather than an adaptation afterthought.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Design and Evaluation of a Culturally Adapted Multimodal Virtual Agent for PTSD Screening

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is highly prevalent yet chronically underreported among combat-exposed military personnel. This paper presents Molhim, a culturally adapted multimodal conversational AI platform that supports purpose-specific interactions through a configurable conversational pipeline consisting of session setup, real-time dialogue with a high-fidelity virtual avatar, and post-session analysis and feedback. In this work, we examine the PTSD screening configuration of the Molhim platform in a military healthcare context. The system employs a conversational avatar driven by a large language model, integrating real-time speech recognition, visual understanding of user input, text-to-speech synthesis, and a high-fidelity human avatar to support structured multi-turn dialogue and automated post-session analysis, including administration of the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5). These findings suggest the feasibility of Molhim as a conversational platform for PTSD screening and highlight design considerations for socially cooperative human-AI systems in clinical environments.

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arXiv2024

HyMNet: a Multimodal Deep Learning System for Hypertension Classification using Fundus Photographs and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors

In recent years, deep learning has shown promise in predicting hypertension (HTN) from fundus images. However, most prior research has primarily focused on analyzing a single type of data, which may not capture the full complexity of HTN risk. To address this limitation, this study introduces a multimodal deep learning (MMDL) system, dubbed HyMNet, which combines fundus images and cardiometabolic risk factors, specifically age and gender, to improve hypertension detection capabilities. Our MMDL system uses RETFound, a foundation model pre-trained on 1.6 million retinal images, for the fundus path and a fully connected neural network for the age and gender path. The two paths are jointly trained by concatenating the feature vectors from each path that are then fed into a fusion network. The system was trained on 5,016 retinal images from 1,243 individuals collected from the Saudi Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs. The results show that the multimodal model that integrates fundus images along with age and gender outperforms the unimodal system trained solely on fundus photographs, with an F1 score of 0.771 [0.747, 0.796], and 0.745 [0.719, 0.772] for hypertension detection, respectively. Additionally, we studied the effect underlying diabetes mellitus has on the model's predictive ability, concluding that diabetes is used as a confounding variable for distinguishing hypertensive cases. Our code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/MohammedSB/HyMNet.

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