A Romanization System and WebMAUS Aligner for Arabic Varieties

Jalal Al-Tamimi (1, 2) , Florian Schiel (3) , Ghada Khattab (4) , Navdeep Sokhey (5) , Djegdjiga Amazouz (6) , Abdulrahman Dallak (4, 7) , Hajar Moussa (8)

1 UPCité - Université Paris Cité
2 LLF - UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle
3 BAS - Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals
4 Newcastle University [Newcastle]
5 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [Blacksburg]
6 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
7 Jazan University [Jazan, Saudi Arabia]
8 KAU - King Abdul Aziz University

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.

Mots clés: Arabic; romanization; dialect-independent; WebMAUS; aligner

Domaines: Linguistique; Linguistique

Jalal Al-Tamimi, Florian Schiel, Ghada Khattab, Navdeep Sokhey, Djegdjiga Amazouz, et al.. A Romanization System and WebMAUS Aligner for Arabic Varieties. 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), 2022, Marseille, France. ⟨hal-03729122⟩