Nelken, RaniShieber, Stuart2008-11-102005Rani Nelken and Stuart M. Shieber. Arabic diacritization using weighted finite-state transducers. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACL Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, pages 79-86, Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 2005.http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:2252610Arabic is usually written without short vowels and additional diacritics, which are nevertheless important for several applications. We present a novel algorithm for restoring these symbols, using a cascade of probabilistic finite- state transducers trained on the Arabic treebank, integrating a word-based language model, a letter-based language model, and an extremely simple morphological model. This combination of probabilistic methods and simple linguistic information yields high levels of accuracy.en-US10.3115/1621787.1621802