Beyond Arabic: Software for Perso-Arabic Script Manipulation

Alexander Gutkin, Cibu Johny, Raiomond Doctor, Brian Roark, Richard Sproat


Abstract
This paper presents an open-source software library that provides a set of finite-state transducer (FST) components and corresponding utilities for manipulating the writing systems of languages that use the Perso-Arabic script. The operations include various levels of script normalization, including visual invariance-preserving operations that subsume and go beyond the standard Unicode normalization forms, as well as transformations that modify the visual appearance of characters in accordance with the regional orthographies for eleven contemporary languages from diverse language families. The library also provides simple FST-based romanization and transliteration. We additionally attempt to formalize the typology of Perso-Arabic characters by providing one-to-many mappings from Unicode code points to the languages that use them. While our work focuses on the Arabic script diaspora rather than Arabic itself, this approach could be adopted for any language that uses the Arabic script, thus providing a unified framework for treating a script family used by close to a billion people.
Anthology ID:
2022.wanlp-1.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Hend Al-Khalifa, Kareem Darwish, Owen Rambow, Fethi Bougares, Ahmed Abdelali, Nadi Tomeh, Salam Khalifa, Wajdi Zaghouani
Venue:
WANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
381–387
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wanlp-1.36
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.wanlp-1.36
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexander Gutkin, Cibu Johny, Raiomond Doctor, Brian Roark, and Richard Sproat. 2022. Beyond Arabic: Software for Perso-Arabic Script Manipulation. In Proceedings of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP), pages 381–387, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Arabic: Software for Perso-Arabic Script Manipulation (Gutkin et al., WANLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wanlp-1.36.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.wanlp-1.36.mp4