Highly Effective Arabic Diacritization using Sequence to Sequence Modeling

Hamdy Mubarak, Ahmed Abdelali, Hassan Sajjad, Younes Samih, Kareem Darwish


Abstract
Arabic text is typically written without short vowels (or diacritics). However, their presence is required for properly verbalizing Arabic and is hence essential for applications such as text to speech. There are two types of diacritics, namely core-word diacritics and case-endings. Most previous works on automatic Arabic diacritic recovery rely on a large number of manually engineered features, particularly for case-endings. In this work, we present a unified character level sequence-to-sequence deep learning model that recovers both types of diacritics without the use of explicit feature engineering. Specifically, we employ a standard neural machine translation setup on overlapping windows of words (broken down into characters), and then we use voting to select the most likely diacritized form of a word. The proposed model outperforms all previous state-of-the-art systems. Our best settings achieve a word error rate (WER) of 4.49% compared to the state-of-the-art of 12.25% on a standard dataset.
Anthology ID:
N19-1248
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2390–2395
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1248
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1248
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hamdy Mubarak, Ahmed Abdelali, Hassan Sajjad, Younes Samih, and Kareem Darwish. 2019. Highly Effective Arabic Diacritization using Sequence to Sequence Modeling. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2390–2395, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Highly Effective Arabic Diacritization using Sequence to Sequence Modeling (Mubarak et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1248.pdf