Processing Judeo-Arabic Texts

Abstract. Judeo-Arabic is a language spoken and written by Jewish communities living in Arab countries. Judeo-Arabic is typically written in Hebrew letters, enriched with diacritic marks that relate to the under-lying Arabic. However, some inconsistencies in rendering words in He-brew letters increase the level of ambiguity of a given word. Furthermore, Judeo-Arabic texts usually contain non-Arabic words and phrases, such as quotations or borrowed words from Hebrew and Aramaic. We focus on two main tasks: (1) automatic transliteration of Judeo-Arabic Hebrew letters into Arabic letters; and (2) automatic identification of language switching points between Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew. For transliteration, we employ a statistical translation system trained on the character level, resulting in 96.9 % precision, a significant improvement over the baseline. For the language switching task, we use a word-level supervised classifier, also showing some significant improvements over the baseline.