Ossama Obeid

The First QALB Shared Task on Automatic Text Correction for Arabic

We present a summary of the first shared task on automatic text correction for Arabic text. The shared task received 18 systems submissions from nine teams in six countries and represented a diversity of approaches. Our report includes an overview of the QALB corpus which was the source of the datasets used for training and evaluation, an overview of participating systems, results of the competition and an analysis of the results and systems.

The Second QALB Shared Task on Automatic Text Correction for Arabic

We present a summary of QALB-2015, the second shared task on automatic text correction of Arabic texts. The shared task extends QALB-2014, which focused on correcting errors in Arabic texts produced by native speakers of Arabic. The competition this year, in addition to native data, includes texts produced by learners of Arabic as a foreign language. The report includes an overview of the QALB corpus, which is the dataset used for training and evaluation, an overview of participating systems, results of the competition and an analysis of the results and systems.

A Pilot Study on Arabic Multi-Genre Corpus Diacritization

Arabic script writing is typically underspecified for short vowels and other mark up, referred to as diacritics. Apart from the lexical ambiguity found in words, similar to that exhibited in other languages, the lack of diacritics in written Arabic script adds another layer of ambiguity which is an artifact of the orthography. Diacritization of written text has a significant impact on Arabic NLP applications. In this paper, we present a pilot study on building a diacritized multi-genre corpus in Arabic. We annotate a sample of nondiacritized words extracted from five text genres. We explore different annotation strategies: Basic where we present only the bare undiacritized forms to the annotators, Intermediate (Basic forms+their POS tags), and Advanced (automatically diacritized words). We present the impact of the annotation strategy on annotation quality. Moreover, we study different diacritization schemes in the process.