The Challenges and Pitfalls of Arabic Romanization and Arabization

The high level of ambiguity of the Arabic script poses special challenges to developers of NLP tools in areas such as morphological analysis, named entity extraction and machine translation. These difficulties are exacerbated by the lack of comprehensive lexical resources, such as proper noun databases, and the multiplicity of ambiguous transcription schemes. This paper focuses on some of the linguistic issues encountered in two subdisciplines that play an increasingly important role in Arabic information processing: the romanization of Arabic names and the arabization of nonArabic names. The basic premise is that linguistic knowledge in the form of linguistic rules is essential for achieving high accuracy.