Arabic Diacritics in the Wild: Exploiting Opportunities for Improved Diacritization

Salman Elgamal, Ossama Obeid, Mhd Kabbani, Go Inoue, Nizar Habash


Abstract
The widespread absence of diacritical marks in Arabic text poses a significant challenge for Arabic natural language processing (NLP). This paper explores instances of naturally occurring diacritics, referred to as “diacritics in the wild,” to unveil patterns and latent information across six diverse genres: news articles, novels, children’s books, poetry, political documents, and ChatGPT outputs. We present a new annotated dataset that maps real-world partially diacritized words to their maximal full diacritization in context. Additionally, we propose extensions to the analyze-and-disambiguate approach in Arabic NLP to leverage these diacritics, resulting in notable improvements. Our contributions encompass a thorough analysis, valuable datasets, and an extended diacritization algorithm. We release our code and datasets as open source.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.792
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14815–14829
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.792
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Salman Elgamal, Ossama Obeid, Mhd Kabbani, Go Inoue, and Nizar Habash. 2024. Arabic Diacritics in the Wild: Exploiting Opportunities for Improved Diacritization. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14815–14829, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Arabic Diacritics in the Wild: Exploiting Opportunities for Improved Diacritization (Elgamal et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.792.pdf