Google Launched its API For its Arabic Diacritic Tool “Tashkeel”
We mentioned on AC at that time some of the differences between Arabic and English languages as Diacritics
“describe how arabic text is pronounced, they are called in Arabic Tashkeel for example in Arabic a (ـِ ) kasra (i) can make the whole meaning of a word different. In Arabic AL-Tashkeel is based on Arabic grammar.”
And that Tashkeel is a important step for several Arabic text processing applications.
Over the weekend, Google Arabia team launched Tashkeel’s JSON API as part of google language API.
To use the API Just make a call to: http://www.googleapis.com/language/diacritize/v1. The parameters are:
message: Arabic text you want to diacritize
lang: Language code for message language. Set to “ar” for Arabic.
last_letter: Set to true to diacritize last letter of each word as well.
Here is a full HTML example from google team showing the API in use:
And If you have any questions about how to use this API or any other question in any programing language head to ArabCrunch.NET Developers Q&A and post there.
This launch give us another example about the difference between Google and Yahoo in the Arab region: Google is focusing more on engineering problems, While Yahoo Middle East is focusing on content, in fact Yahoo hired recently Hosam Sokkari former Head Of BBC Arabic as head of Audience In Yahoo! Middle East. Yahoo Middle East or Yahoo Maktoob until this moment did not launch a single API for any of Maktoob site which it bought last year.
Also here as we objected when Google used the name “Middle East”, we object to the name Yahoo Middle East and ask Yahoo to call its regional arm: Yahoo Arabia or the Yahoo The Arab world. As this area is mostly lived by Arabs and have been known for a long time as the Arab world!