Effective Deep Learning Models for Automatic Diacritization of Arabic Text

Abstract

While building a text-to-speech system for the Arabic language, we found that the system synthesized speeches with many pronunciation errors. The primary source of these errors is the lack of diacritics in modern standard Arabic writing. These diacritics are small strokes that appear above or below each letter to provide pronunciation and grammatical information. We propose three deep learning models to recover Arabic text diacritics based on our work in a text-to-speech synthesis system using deep learning. The first model is a baseline model used to test how a simple deep learning model performs on the corpora. The second model is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, which resembles our text-to-speech synthesis model with many modifications to suit this problem. The last model is based on the encoder part of the text-to-speech model, which achieves state-of-the-art performances in both word error rate and diacritic error rate metrics. These models will benefit a wide range of natural language processing applications such as text-to-speech, part-of-speech tagging, and machine translation.