Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Alasmary, Faris, Zaafarani, Orjuwan, Ghannam, Ahmad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03236
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914868916912128
author Alasmary, Faris
Zaafarani, Orjuwan
Ghannam, Ahmad
author_facet Alasmary, Faris
Zaafarani, Orjuwan
Ghannam, Ahmad
contents Tashkeel, or Arabic Text Diacritization (ATD), greatly enhances the comprehension of Arabic text by removing ambiguity and minimizing the risk of misinterpretations caused by its absence. It plays a crucial role in improving Arabic text processing, particularly in applications such as text-to-speech and machine translation. This paper introduces a new approach to training ATD models. First, we finetuned two transformers, encoder-only and encoder-decoder, that were initialized from a pretrained character-based BERT. Then, we applied the Noisy-Student approach to boost the performance of the best model. We evaluated our models alongside 11 commercial and open-source models using two manually labeled benchmark datasets: WikiNews and our CATT dataset. Our findings show that our top model surpasses all evaluated models by relative Diacritic Error Rates (DERs) of 30.83\% and 35.21\% on WikiNews and CATT, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art in ATD. In addition, we show that our model outperforms GPT-4-turbo on CATT dataset by a relative DER of 9.36\%. We open-source our CATT models and benchmark dataset for the research community\footnote{https://github.com/abjadai/catt}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03236
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CATT: Character-based Arabic Tashkeel Transformer
Alasmary, Faris
Zaafarani, Orjuwan
Ghannam, Ahmad
Computation and Language
Tashkeel, or Arabic Text Diacritization (ATD), greatly enhances the comprehension of Arabic text by removing ambiguity and minimizing the risk of misinterpretations caused by its absence. It plays a crucial role in improving Arabic text processing, particularly in applications such as text-to-speech and machine translation. This paper introduces a new approach to training ATD models. First, we finetuned two transformers, encoder-only and encoder-decoder, that were initialized from a pretrained character-based BERT. Then, we applied the Noisy-Student approach to boost the performance of the best model. We evaluated our models alongside 11 commercial and open-source models using two manually labeled benchmark datasets: WikiNews and our CATT dataset. Our findings show that our top model surpasses all evaluated models by relative Diacritic Error Rates (DERs) of 30.83\% and 35.21\% on WikiNews and CATT, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art in ATD. In addition, we show that our model outperforms GPT-4-turbo on CATT dataset by a relative DER of 9.36\%. We open-source our CATT models and benchmark dataset for the research community\footnote{https://github.com/abjadai/catt}.
title CATT: Character-based Arabic Tashkeel Transformer
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03236