Restoring Arabic vowels through omission-tolerant dictionary lookup

TL;DR

This paper introduces Arabic-Unitex, a rule-based system for restoring omitted vowels in written Arabic, achieving high coverage and efficiency in vowel restoration and error detection.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive set of typographical rules and a fast dictionary lookup method for vowel restoration in written Arabic, with high lexical coverage.

Findings

Restores vowels with over 99% lexical coverage.

Analyzes 5000 words per second in text.

Detects invalid or misplaced vowels effectively.

Abstract

Vowels in Arabic are optional orthographic symbols written as diacritics above or below letters. In Arabic texts, typically more than 97 percent of written words do not explicitly show any of the vowels they contain; that is to say, depending on the author, genre and field, less than 3 percent of words include any explicit vowel. Although numerous studies have been published on the issue of restoring the omitted vowels in speech technologies, little attention has been given to this problem in papers dedicated to written Arabic technologies.f In this research, we present Arabic-Unitex, an Arabic Language Resource, with emphasis on vowel representation and encoding. Specifically, we present two dozens of rules formalizing a detailed description of vowel omission in written text. They are typographical rules integrated into large-coverage resources for morphological annotation. For restoring vowels, our resources are capable of identifying words in which the vowels are not shown, as well as words in which the vowels are partially or fully included. By taking into account these rules, our resources are able to compute and restore for each word form a list of compatible fully vowelized candidates through omission-tolerant dictionary lookup. Our program performs the analysis of 5000 words/second for running text (20 pages/second). Based on these comprehensive linguistic resources, we created a spell checker that detects any invalid/misplaced vowel in a fully or partially vowelized form. Finally, our resources provide a lexical coverage of more than 99 percent of the words used in popular newspapers, and restore vowels in words (out of context) simply and efficiently.