Unicode Normalization and Grapheme Parsing of Indic Languages
Nazmuddoha Ansary, Quazi Adibur Rahman Adib, Tahsin Reasat, Asif Shahriyar Sushmit, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Sazia Mehnaz, Kanij Fatema, Mohammad Mamun Or Rashid, Farig Sadeque
Abstract
Writing systems of Indic languages have orthographic syllables, also known as complex graphemes, as unique horizontal units. A prominent feature of these languages is these complex grapheme units that comprise consonants/consonant conjuncts, vowel diacritics, and consonant diacritics, which, together make a unique Language. Unicode-based writing schemes of these languages often disregard this feature of these languages and encode words as linear sequences of Unicode characters using an intricate scheme of connector characters and font interpreters. Due to this way of using a few dozen Unicode glyphs to write thousands of different unique glyphs (complex graphemes), there are serious ambiguities that lead to malformed words. In this paper, we are proposing two libraries: i) a normalizer for normalizing inconsistencies caused by a Unicode-based encoding scheme for Indic languages and ii) a grapheme parser for Abugida text. It deconstructs words into visually distinct orthographic syllables or complex graphemes and their constituents. Our proposed normalizer is a more efficient and effective tool than the previously used IndicNLP normalizer. Moreover, our parser and normalizer are also suitable tools for general Abugida text processing as they performed well in our robust word-based and NLP experiments. We report the pipeline for the scripts of 7 languages in this work and develop the framework for the integration of more scripts.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.1479
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 17019–17030
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1479
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Nazmuddoha Ansary, Quazi Adibur Rahman Adib, Tahsin Reasat, Asif Shahriyar Sushmit, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Sazia Mehnaz, Kanij Fatema, Mohammad Mamun Or Rashid, and Farig Sadeque. 2024. Unicode Normalization and Grapheme Parsing of Indic Languages. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 17019–17030, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Unicode Normalization and Grapheme Parsing of Indic Languages (Ansary et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.1479.pdf