Arabic machine transliteration using an attention-based encoder-decoder model

Transliteration is the process of converting words from a given source language alphabet to a target language alphabet, in a way that best preserves the phonetic and orthographic aspects of the transliterated words. Even though an important effort has been made towards improving this process for many languages such as English, French and Chinese, little research work has been accomplished with regard to the Arabic language. In this work, an attention-based encoder-decoder system is proposed for the task of Machine Transliteration between the Arabic and English languages. Our experiments proved the efficiency of our proposal approach in comparison to some previous research developed in this area

Arabic machine transliteration using an attention-based encoder-decoder model

Transliteration is the process of converting words from a given source language alphabet to a target language alphabet, in a way that best preserves the phonetic and orthographic aspects of the transliterated words. Even though an important effort has been made towards improving this process for many languages such as English, French and Chinese, little research work has been accomplished with regard to the Arabic language. In this work, an attention-based encoder-decoder system is proposed for the task of Machine Transliteration between the Arabic and English languages. Our experiments proved the efficiency of our proposal approach in comparison to some previous research developed in this area

ANETAC: Arabic named entity transliteration and classification dataset

In this paper, we make freely accessible ANETAC, our English-Arabic named entity transliteration and classification dataset that we built from freely available parallel translation corpora. The dataset contains 79, 924 instances, each instance is a triplet (e, a, c), where e is the English named entity, a is its Arabic transliteration and c is its class that can be either a Person, a Location, or an Organization. The ANETAC dataset is mainly aimed for the researchers that are working on Arabic named entity transliteration, but it can also be used for named entity classification purposes. This dataset was developed and used as part of a previous research study done by Hadj Ameur et al. [1]

Character-level and syntax-level models for low-resource and multilingual natural language processing

There are more than 7000 languages in the world, but only a small portion of them benefit from Natural Language Processing resources and models. Although languages generally present different characteristics, “cross-lingual bridges” can be exploited, such as transliteration signals and word alignment links. Such information, together with the availability of multiparallel corpora and the urge to overcome language barriers, motivates us to build models that represent more of the world’s languages. This thesis investigates cross-lingual links for improving the processing of low-resource languages with language-agnostic models at the character and syntax level. Specifically, we propose to (i) use orthographic similarities and transliteration between Named Entities and rare words in different languages to improve the construction of Bilingual Word Embeddings (BWEs) and named entity resources, and (ii) exploit multiparallel corpora for projecting labels from high- to low-resource languages, thereby gaining access to weakly supervised processing methods for the latter. In the first publication, we describe our approach for improving the translation of rare words and named entities for the Bilingual Dictionary Induction (BDI) task, using orthography and transliteration information. In our second work, we tackle BDI by enriching BWEs with orthography embeddings and a number of other features, using our classification-based system to overcome script differences among languages. The third publication describes cheap cross-lingual signals that should be considered when building mapping approaches for BWEs since they are simple to extract, effective for bootstrapping the mapping of BWEs, and overcome the failure of unsupervised methods. The fourth paper shows our approach for extracting a named entity resource for 1340 languages, including very low-resource languages from all major areas of linguistic diversity. We exploit parallel corpus statistics and transliteration models and obtain improved performance over prior work. Lastly, the fifth work models annotation projection as a graph-based label propagation problem for the part of speech tagging task. Part of speech models trained on our labeled sets outperform prior work for low-resource languages like Bambara (an African language spoken in Mali), Erzya (a Uralic language spoken in Russia’s Republic of Mordovia), Manx (the Celtic language of the Isle of Man), and Yoruba (a Niger-Congo language spoken in Nigeria and surrounding countries)