Hebrew Diacritics Restoration using Visual Representation
This addresses the problem of accurate word pronunciation and disambiguation in Hebrew text, which is incremental as it builds on recent machine learning advances for this specific task.
The paper tackled Hebrew diacritics restoration by proposing DIVRIT, a system that frames it as a zero-shot classification problem using a Hebrew Visual Language Model, achieving high accuracy in an oracle setting.
Diacritics restoration in Hebrew is a fundamental task for ensuring accurate word pronunciation and disambiguating textual meaning. Despite the language's high degree of ambiguity when unvocalized, recent machine learning approaches have significantly advanced performance on this task. In this work, we present DIVRIT, a novel system for Hebrew diacritization that frames the task as a zero-shot classification problem. Our approach operates at the word level, selecting the most appropriate diacritization pattern for each undiacritized word from a dynamically generated candidate set, conditioned on the surrounding textual context. A key innovation of DIVRIT is its use of a Hebrew Visual Language Model, which processes undiacritized text as an image, allowing diacritic information to be embedded directly within the input's vector representation. Through a comprehensive evaluation across various configurations, we demonstrate that the system effectively performs diacritization without relying on complex, explicit linguistic analysis. Notably, in an ``oracle'' setting where the correct diacritized form is guaranteed to be among the provided candidates, DIVRIT achieves a high level of accuracy. Furthermore, strategic architectural enhancements and optimized training methodologies yield significant improvements in the system's overall generalization capabilities. These findings highlight the promising potential of visual representations for accurate and automated Hebrew diacritization.