A Context-Contrastive Inference Approach To Partial Diacritization

Muhammad ElNokrashy, Badr AlKhamissi


Abstract
Diacritization plays a pivotal role for meaning disambiguation and improving readability in Arabic texts. Efforts have long focused on marking every eligible character (Full Diacritization). Overlooked in comparison, Partial Diacritzation (‘PD‘) is the selection of a subset of characters to be annotated to aid comprehension only where needed. Research has indicated that excessive diacritic marks can hinder skilled readers—reducing reading speed and accuracy. We conduct a behavioral experiment and show that partially marked text is often easier to read than fully marked text, and sometimes easier than plain text. In this light, we introduce Context-Contrastive Partial Diacritization (‘CCPD‘)—a novel approach to ‘PD‘ which integrates seamlessly with existing Arabic diacritization systems. ‘CCPD‘ processes each word twice, once with context and once without, and diacritizes only the characters with disparities between the two inferences. Further, we introduce novel indicators for measuring partial diacritization quality to help establish this as a machine learning task. Lastly, we introduce ‘TD2‘, a Transformer-variant of an established model which offers a markedly different performance profile on our proposed indicators compared to all other known systems.
Anthology ID:
2024.arabicnlp-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Ramy Eskander, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Ahmed Abdelali, Samia Touileb, Injy Hamed, Yaser Onaizan, Bashar Alhafni, Wissam Antoun, Salam Khalifa, Hatem Haddad, Imed Zitouni, Badr AlKhamissi, Rawan Almatham, Khalil Mrini
Venues:
ArabicNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
89–101
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.arabicnlp-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.arabicnlp-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muhammad ElNokrashy and Badr AlKhamissi. 2024. A Context-Contrastive Inference Approach To Partial Diacritization. In Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 89–101, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Context-Contrastive Inference Approach To Partial Diacritization (ElNokrashy & AlKhamissi, ArabicNLP-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.arabicnlp-1.8.pdf