amLite: Amharic Transliteration Using Key Map Dictionary
This addresses a domain-specific issue for researchers working with Amharic linguistic data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing transliteration methods.
The paper tackles the problem of converting ASCII transliterated Amharic texts back to original Amharic letters to ensure data consistency and interoperability, achieving accuracies of 97.7%, 99.7%, and 98.4% on test samples.
amLite is a framework developed to map ASCII transliterated Amharic texts back to the original Amharic letter texts. The aim of such a framework is to make existing Amharic linguistic data consistent and interoperable among researchers. For achieving the objective, a key map dictionary is constructed using the possible ASCII combinations actively in use for transliterating Amharic letters; and a mapping of the combinations to the corresponding Amharic letters is done. The mapping is then used to replace the Amharic linguistic text back to form the original Amharic letters text. The framework indicated 97.7, 99.7 and 98.4 percentage accuracy on converting the three sample random test data. It is; however, possible to improve the accuracy of the framework by adding an exception to the implementation of the algorithm, or by preprocessing the input text prior to conversion. This paper outlined the rationales behind the need for developing the framework and the processes undertaken in the development.