© Fadoua Ataa Allah and Siham Boulaknadel

1. Natural Language Processing for
Amazigh Language:
Challenges and Future Directions
Fadoua Ataa Allah Siham Boulaknadel
CEISIC, IRCAM
{ataaallah, boulaknadel}@ircam.ma

2. Outline
 Amazigh Language
 Amazigh Complexity in NLP
 State of the Technology on Amazigh
 Future Directions
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3. Amazigh language
Sociolinguistic Context
North African autochthonous language
 Spoken by millions of people as dialects
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4. Amazigh language
Sociolinguistic Context
 Languages of Morocco
 Classical Arabic as an official language.
 Amazigh, since 2011 it becomes an official
language.
 Moroccan Arabic or Darija is the diglossia of
Classical Arabic.
 French as the first foreign language.
 Spanish is used in the north of Morocco.
 English is becoming the second foreign language.
10/07/2012
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5. Amazigh language
History
 Amazigh abjed
 Tifinagh is attested from
25 centuries.
 Its writing form has
continued to change
from the traditional
Tuareg writing to the
Tifinaghe-IRCAM .
Tinzouline Inscriptions
(Zagora, Morocco)
10/07/2012
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6. Amazigh language
History
Direction
Plate 9
Anou Elias, Mammanet
Valley (Niger).
Henri Lhote, Oued
Mammanet gravures.
Les Nouvelles Editions
Africaines. 1979
10/07/2012
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7. Moroccan Amazigh characteristics
 Amazigh writing system
 Direction: horizontal from left to right.
 Alphabet:
 27 consonants: ⴱ, ⴳ, ⴳⵯ, ⴷ, ⴹ, ⴼ, ⴽ, ⴽⵯ, ⵀ, ⵃ, ⵄ, ⵅ, ⵇ, ⵊ, ⵍ, ⵎ, ⵏ, ⵔ, ⵕ ,
ⵖ, ⵙ, ⵚ, ⵛ, ⵜ, ⵟ, ⵣ, ⵥ;
 2 semi-consonants: ⵢ and ⵡ;
 4 vowels: ⴰ, ⵉ, ⵓ, ⴻ.
 Punctuation marks: conventional signs including: “ ”
(space), “.”, “,”, “;”, “:”, “?”, “!”, “…” , etc.
 Numerals: Hindu-Arabic numerals [0-9].
10/07/2012
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8. Amazigh Complexity in NLP
 Different writing forms
 Complex phonology and phonetic
systems
 Rich morphology
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9. Amazigh Complexity in NLP
Amazigh script
 Writing prescriptions’ conversion into
‘Tifinaghe – Unicode’ is confronted with:
 Spelling variation related to regional
varieties ([tfucht] [tafukt] (sun)),
 Spelling variation based on the use or the
elimination of spaces within or between
words ([tadartino] [tadart ino] (my house)).
 Arabic or Latin transcription systems.
LREC-2012: SALTMIL-AfLaT Workshop 9

10. Amazigh Complexity in NLP
Phonology & phonetic
 The main problem of Amazigh phonology
and phonetic consists on allophones:
/ll/ that is realized as [dj] in the North.
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11. Amazigh Complexity in NLP
Morphology
 High inflected language.
 Word structure:
Prefix Stem Suffix
 Affixes set: Prefixes, Infixes, and Suffixes.
 Base form varies with paradigms:
(qqim  svim (make sit)).
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12. State of the Amazigh technology
 Tifinaghe Encoding
 Optical character recognition
 Fundamental processing tools
 Language resources
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13. State of the Amazigh technology
Tifinaghe Encoding
 ANSI  Unicode
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14. State of the Amazigh technology
OCR
 Amazigh OCR systems:
 System focused on isolated printed characters
based on a syntactic approach using finite
automata.
 Global approach based on Hidden Markov
Models for recognizing handwritten characters.
 Method using invariant moments for recognizing
printed script.
 System based on artificial neural network to
recognize printed characters.
LREC-2012: SALTMIL-AfLaT Workshop 14

15. State of the Amazigh technology
Fundamental processing
 Transliterator
 Tagging assistance tool
 Light stemmer
 Search engine
 Concordancer
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16. State of the Amazigh technology
Fundamental processing
 Transliterator
Arabic script
Tifinaghe
Latin script Convertisor
Unicode
Tifinaghe Latin Transliterator
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17. State of the Amazigh technology
Fundamental processing
 Tagging assistance tool
Amazigh
raw
corpora
Tokenization
Manual POS Tag
Manual Stemming set
Stem
Tagged
list
corpus
Validation
Standard output
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18. State of the Amazigh technology
Fundamental processing
 Light stemmer Begin
Prefix + Stem + Suffix
Find the largest
prefix
Stem + Suffix Find the largest
suffix
Stem
End
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19. State of the Amazigh technology
Fundamental processing
 Search engine
Query Engine
Natural Language Index
Processing Tools
Data Data Indexing
Searching Indexer
User Interface
Natural Language
Processing Tools
Data Crawling
Repository
Web Crawler
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20. State of the Amazigh technology
Fundamental processing
 Concordancer
input field
.txt,.doc
.pdf, .zip
Tokenization
List of the text words Word / expression
and their frequency Context display
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21. State of the Amazigh technology
Language resources
 Corpora
 Dictionary
 Terminology database
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22. State of the Amazigh technology
Language resources
 Corpora:
 General corpus,
 POS corpus.
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23. State of the Amazigh technology
Language resources
 Dictionary
 Definition,
 Arabic equivalent words,
 French equivalent words,
 English equivalent words,
 Synonyms,
 Classification by domains,
 Derivational families.
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24. State of the Amazigh technology
Language resources
 Terminology database
 Media vocabulary
 Grammatical vocabulary
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25. Future Directions
 Building a large and representative
Amazigh corpora.
 Developing a machine translation
system.
 Creating a pool of competent human
resources.
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26. Thank you
for
your attention
ⵜⴰⵏⵎⵉⵔⵜ
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