Related papers: Graphemic Normalization of the Perso-Arabic Script

Despite the progress made in recent years in addressing natural language understanding (NLU) challenges, the majority of this progress remains to be concentrated on resource-rich languages like English. This work focuses on Persian…

The cursive nature of multilingual characters segmentation and recognition of Arabic, Persian, Urdu languages have attracted researchers from academia and industry. However, despite several decades of research, still multilingual characters…

Building robust recognizers for Arabic has always been challenging. We demonstrate the effectiveness of an end-to-end trainable CNN-RNN hybrid architecture in recognizing Arabic text in videos and natural scenes. We outperform previous…

Handwritten Arabic manuscripts preserve the Arab world's intellectual and cultural heritage, and writer identification supports provenance, authenticity verification, and historical analysis. Using the Muharaf dataset of historical Arabic…

This paper presents a comparative study for window-based descriptors on the application of Arabic handwritten alphabet recognition. We show a detailed experimental evaluation of different descriptors with several classifiers. The objective…

This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the impact of tokenization strategies and vocabulary sizes on the performance of Arabic language models in downstream natural language processing tasks. Our investigation focused on the…

The advancement of large language models has significantly improved natural language processing. However, challenges such as jailbreaks (prompt injections that cause an LLM to follow instructions contrary to its intended use),…

In this paper, we present the annotation pipeline and the guidelines we wrote as part of an effort to create a large manually annotated Arabic author profiling dataset from various social media sources covering 16 Arabic countries and 11…

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are integral to many modern natural language processing (NLP) systems. Although multilingual models cover a wide range of languages, they often grapple with challenges like high inference costs and a lack…

With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems…

Tokenization - the practice of converting strings of characters from an alphabet into sequences of tokens over a vocabulary - is a critical step in the NLP pipeline. The use of token representations is widely credited with increased model…

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Persian presents unique challenges due to its complex phonological features, particularly homographs and Ezafe, which exist in formal and informal language contexts. This paper introduces an…

Handwritten Arabic script recognition is a challenging task due to the script's dynamic letter forms and contextual variations. This paper proposes a hybrid approach combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer-based…

In this paper, we introduce the first phase of a new dataset for offline Arabic handwriting recognition. The aim is to collect a very large dataset of isolated Arabic words that covers all letters of the alphabet in all possible shapes…

The OpenITI team has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties. These numbers are based on our tests of seven different Arabic-script texts of varying quality and…

Gender bias in natural language processing (NLP) applications, particularly machine translation, has been receiving increasing attention. Much of the research on this issue has focused on mitigating gender bias in English NLP models and…

Optical character recognition (OCR) has advanced rapidly with the rise of vision-language models, yet evaluation has remained concentrated on a small cluster of high- and mid-resource scripts. We introduce GlotOCR Bench, a comprehensive…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) can play a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility of spoken languages worldwide. In this paper, we build a set of ASR tools for Amharic, a language spoken by more than 50 million people primarily in…

Ethiopic/Amharic script is one of the oldest African writing systems, which serves at least 23 languages (e.g., Amharic, Tigrinya) in East Africa for more than 120 million people. The Amharic writing system, Abugida, has 282 syllables, 15…

Automatic readability assessment is relevant to building NLP applications for education, content analysis, and accessibility. However, Arabic readability assessment is a challenging task due to Arabic's morphological richness and limited…