Koshur Diacritizer: A Byte-Level Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Kashmiri Diacritic Restoration

Abstract:Kashmiri, an Indo-Aryan language written in a modified Perso-Arabic script, frequently omits diacritic marks in digital text, creating ambiguity and challenging downstream NLP applications. We present Koshur Diacritizer, a ByT5-small byte-level sequence-to-sequence model for restoring diacritics in Kashmiri text. To support this task, we release a publicly available dataset of 23.7k aligned undiacritized diacritized Kashmiri sentence pairs. The proposed framework combines script-aware normalization, alignment validation, and skeleton-preserving inference to ensure reliable restoration while maintaining the original base-letter sequence. Experimental results on a held-out test set achieve a DERm of 0.2012 and a WER of 0.2159. Additionally, evaluation by a native Kashmiri linguistic expert yields a mean accuracy of 77.5%. The dataset, model, and source code are publicly released to provide a reproducible baseline for Kashmiri diacritic restoration and future low-resource language research.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2606.15883 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.15883v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.15883 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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