A Romanization System and WebMAUS Aligner for Arabic Varieties
Jalal Al‐Tamimi, Florian Schiel, Ghada Khattab, Navdeep Sokhey, Djegdjiga Amazouz, Abdulrahman Dallak, Hajar Moussa · 2022
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.