Hajar Moussa


2022

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A Romanization System and WebMAUS Aligner for Arabic Varieties
Jalal Al-Tamimi | Florian Schiel | Ghada Khattab | Navdeep Sokhey | Djegdjiga Amazouz | Abdulrahman Dallak | Hajar Moussa
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper presents the results of an ongoing collaboration to develop an Arabic variety-independent romanization system that aims to homogenize and simplify the romanization of the Arabic script, and introduces an Arabic variety-independent WebMAUS service offering a free to use forced-alignment service fully integrated within the WebMAUS services. We present the rationale for developing such a system, highlighting the need for a detailed romanization system with graphemes corresponding to the phonemic short and long vowels/consonants in Arabic varieties. We describe how the acoustic model was created, followed by several hands-on recipes for applying the forced alignment webservice either online or programatically. Finally, we discuss some of the issues we faced during the development of the system.