Automatic Transliteration of Judeo-Arabic Texts into Arabic Script

! The Judeo-Arabic languages comprise a set of dialects spoken and written by Jewish communities living in Arab countries, mainly during the middle ages. Judeo-Arabic is typically written in Hebrew letters, enriched with various diacritic marks. The Judeo-Arabic spoken and written by any particular Jewish community is similar to the Arabic dialect used by their local Muslim community. In addition, Judeo-Arabic dialects borrow words from Aramaic and Hebrew, sometimes modified according to Arabic morphological rules. Since the Arabic alphabet is larger than the Hebrew one, additional diacritic marks are added to some Hebrew letters when rendering Arabic consonants that are lacking in the Hebrew alphabet. Judeo-Arabic authors often use different letters and diacritic marks to represent the same Arabic consonant. For example, some authors use ‫ג‬ to represent " and ‫ג׳‬ to represent $, while others reverse the two. This inconsistency increases the level of ambiguity of a given word, making the reading of Judeo-Arabic texts a challenging task even for an Arabic speaker. Such inconsistencies may be observed even in the same document. For instance, the letter ‫י‬ sometimes represents the letter &, such as in the word ‫פי‬ (" in " , ‫,)في‬ sometimes represents the letter (, such as in the word ‫סילת‬ (" I was asked " , (" on " / " to " / " at " , in Arabic ‫.)على‬ Currently, many works in Judeo-Arabic are being made available on the web. However, most Arabic speakers are unfamiliar with the Hebrew script, let alone the way it is used to render Judeo-Arabic. Therefore, there is a crucial need for automatic tools capable of transliterating Judeo-Arabic texts in Arabic letters. Since Judeo-Arabic texts usually contain some non-Arabic words, transliteration is only one step toward providing a full Arabic translation for a given Judeo-Arabic input. We are focusing mainly on the transliteration process, leaving Hebrew and Aramaic words in their original Hebrew script. As mentioned above, Judeo-Arabic is not a single language, but rather a set of dialects, each used by the local Jewish community in some of the Arab countries. Some texts are similar to Classical Arabic, the ancestor of the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is widely used today in formal settings, while other texts are more similar to local Muslim dialects. We focus, for now, on the Judeo-Arabic version that is similar to MSA more than on the colloquial versions. We model …