A System for Diacritizing Four Varieties of Arabic

Short vowels, aka diacritics, are more often omitted when writing different varieties of Arabic including Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Classical Arabic (CA), and Dialectal Arabic (DA). However, diacritics are required to properly pronounce words, which makes diacritic restoration (a.k.a. diacritization) essential for language learning and text-to-speech applications. In this paper, we present a system for diacritizing MSA, CA, and two varieties of DA, namely Moroccan and Tunisian. The system uses a character level sequence-to-sequence deep learning model that requires no feature engineering and beats all previous SOTA systems for all the Arabic varieties that we test on.