Employing a Multilingual Transformer Model for Segmenting Unpunctuated Arabic Text

Long unpunctuated texts containing complex linguistic sentences are a stumbling block to processing any low-resource languages. Thus, approaches that attempt to segment lengthy texts with no proper punctuation into simple candidate sentences are a vitally important preprocessing task in many hard-to-solve NLP applications. To this end, we propose a preprocessing solution for segmenting unpunctuated Arabic texts into potentially independent clauses. This solution consists of: (1) a punctuation detection model built on top of a multilingual BERT-based model, and (2) some generic linguistic rules for validating the resulting segmentation. Furthermore, we optimize the strategy of applying these linguistic rules using our suggested greedy-like algorithm. We call the proposed solution PDTS (standing for Punctuation Detector for Text Segmentation). Concerning the evaluation, we showcase how PDTS can be effectively employed as a text tokenizer for unpunctuated documents (i.e., mimicking the transcribed audio-to-text documents). Experimental findings across two evaluation protocols (involving an ablation study and a human-based judgment) demonstrate that PDTS is practically effective in both performance quality and computational cost. In particular, PDTS can reach an average F-Measure score of approximately 75%, indicating a minimum improvement of roughly 13% (i.e., compared to the performance of the state-of-the-art competitor models).