78 research outputs found
Take the Hint: Improving Arabic Diacritization with Partially-Diacritized Text
Automatic Arabic diacritization is useful in many applications, ranging from
reading support for language learners to accurate pronunciation predictor for
downstream tasks like speech synthesis. While most of the previous works
focused on models that operate on raw non-diacritized text, production systems
can gain accuracy by first letting humans partly annotate ambiguous words. In
this paper, we propose 2SDiac, a multi-source model that can effectively
support optional diacritics in input to inform all predictions. We also
introduce Guided Learning, a training scheme to leverage given diacritics in
input with different levels of random masking. We show that the provided hints
during test affect more output positions than those annotated. Moreover,
experiments on two common benchmarks show that our approach i) greatly
outperforms the baseline also when evaluated on non-diacritized text; and ii)
achieves state-of-the-art results while reducing the parameter count by over
60%.Comment: Arabic text diacritization, partially-diacritized text, Arabic
natural language processin
Homograph Disambiguation Through Selective Diacritic Restoration
Lexical ambiguity, a challenging phenomenon in all natural languages, is
particularly prevalent for languages with diacritics that tend to be omitted in
writing, such as Arabic. Omitting diacritics leads to an increase in the number
of homographs: different words with the same spelling. Diacritic restoration
could theoretically help disambiguate these words, but in practice, the
increase in overall sparsity leads to performance degradation in NLP
applications. In this paper, we propose approaches for automatically marking a
subset of words for diacritic restoration, which leads to selective homograph
disambiguation. Compared to full or no diacritic restoration, these approaches
yield selectively-diacritized datasets that balance sparsity and lexical
disambiguation. We evaluate the various selection strategies extrinsically on
several downstream applications: neural machine translation, part-of-speech
tagging, and semantic textual similarity. Our experiments on Arabic show
promising results, where our devised strategies on selective diacritization
lead to a more balanced and consistent performance in downstream applications.Comment: accepted in WANLP 201
Neural Arabic Text Diacritization: State of the Art Results and a Novel Approach for Machine Translation
In this work, we present several deep learning models for the automatic
diacritization of Arabic text. Our models are built using two main approaches,
viz. Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN),
with several enhancements such as 100-hot encoding, embeddings, Conditional
Random Field (CRF) and Block-Normalized Gradient (BNG). The models are tested
on the only freely available benchmark dataset and the results show that our
models are either better or on par with other models, which require
language-dependent post-processing steps, unlike ours. Moreover, we show that
diacritics in Arabic can be used to enhance the models of NLP tasks such as
Machine Translation (MT) by proposing the Translation over Diacritization (ToD)
approach.Comment: 18 pages, 17 figures, 14 table
Arabic diacritization using weighted finite-state transducers
Arabic is usually written without short vowels and additional diacritics, which are nevertheless important for several applications. We present a novel algorithm for restoring these symbols, using a cascade of probabilistic finite- state transducers trained on the Arabic treebank, integrating a word-based language model, a letter-based language model, and an extremely simple morphological model. This combination of probabilistic methods and simple linguistic information yields high levels of accuracy.Engineering and Applied Science
Combining Speech with textual methods for arabic diacritization
Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC
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