Exploiting Lexical Resources for Disambiguating CJK and Arabic Orthographic Variants
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008)
Abstract
The orthographical complexities of Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK) and Arabic pose a special challenge to developers of NLP applications. These difficulties are exacerbated by the lack of a standardized orthography in these languages, especially the highly irregular Japanese orthography and the ambiguities of the Arabic script. This paper focuses on CJK and Arabic orthographic variation and provides a brief analysis of the linguistic issues. The basic premise is that statistical methods by themselves are inadequate, and that linguistic knowledge supported by large-scale lexical databases should play a central role in achieving high accuracy in disambiguating and normalizing orthographic variants.