Ali Fadel

Ali Fadel, Ibraheem Tuffaha, Bara' Al-Jawarneh et al.

Diacritization of Arabic text is both an interesting and a challenging problem at the same time with various applications ranging from speech synthesis to helping students learning the Arabic language. Like many other tasks or problems in Arabic language processing, the weak efforts invested into this problem and the lack of available (open-source) resources hinder the progress towards solving this problem. This work provides a critical review for the currently existing systems, measures and resources for Arabic text diacritization. Moreover, it introduces a much-needed free-for-all cleaned dataset that can be easily used to benchmark any work on Arabic diacritization. Extracted from the Tashkeela Corpus, the dataset consists of 55K lines containing about 2.3M words. After constructing the dataset, existing tools and systems are tested on it. The results of the experiments show that the neural Shakkala system significantly outperforms traditional rule-based approaches and other closed-source tools with a Diacritic Error Rate (DER) of 2.88% compared with 13.78%, which the best DER for the non-neural approach (obtained by the Mishkal tool).

Ali Fadel, Ibraheem Tuffaha, Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub

In this paper, we describe our team's effort on the semantic text question similarity task of NSURL 2019. Our top performing system utilizes several innovative data augmentation techniques to enlarge the training data. Then, it takes ELMo pre-trained contextual embeddings of the data and feeds them into an ON-LSTM network with self-attention. This results in sequence representation vectors that are used to predict the relation between the question pairs. The model is ranked in the 1st place with 96.499 F1-score (same as the second place F1-score) and the 2nd place with 94.848 F1-score (differs by 1.076 F1-score from the first place) on the public and private leaderboards, respectively.