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A survey of automatic Arabic diacritization techniques

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2013

AQIL M. AZMI  and
REHAM S. ALMAJED
AQIL M. AZMI
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia e-mails: aqil@ksu.edu.sa, reham.imamu@gmail.com
REHAM S. ALMAJED
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia e-mails: aqil@ksu.edu.sa, reham.imamu@gmail.com
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Abstract

In Modern Standard Arabic texts are typically written without diacritical markings. The diacritics are important to clarify the sense and meaning of words. Lack of these markings may lead to ambiguity even for the natives. Often the natives successfully disambiguate the meaning through the context; however, many Arabic applications, such as machine translation, text-to-speech, and information retrieval, are vulnerable due to lack of diacritics. The process of automatically restoring diacritical marks is called diacritization or diacritic restoration. In this paper we discuss the properties of the Arabic language and the issues that are related to the lack of the diacritical marking. It will be followed by a survey of the recent algorithms that were developed to solve the diacritization problem. We also look into the future trend for researchers working in this area.

Type
Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , May 2015 , pp. 477 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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