A Regular Conversion Algorithm Between Turkish and Ottoman

Modern Turkish spells all words of Turkish, Arabic, or Farsi origin according to their pronunciation. When it comes to converting from one system to another, this creates a problem that can be addressed with the aid of regular expressions.

For example, in Ottoman, a word is spelled as mnwr (mim-nun-vav-ra), following the Arabic orthography, but in Modern Turkish, the spelling reflects the pronunciation as münevver. Since a one-to-one mapping is not possible between these two writing systems, a set of possible Ottoman spellings must be produced using a regular expression.

When the parser sees münevver, it should convert this to a pattern like mv?nh?(a1)?ww?h?r. This pattern produces a set of strings, where mvnha1vvhr might be the longest and mnwr the shortest. By performing a dictionary search, the system can verify that there is a word in Ottoman spelled as mnwr, thus selecting it as the correct spelling.

The dictionary in our study consists of word labels. The system will look up a set of handwritten word images after this label lookup and search for these images in the document. It can also create a set of candidate images from the regular expression by rendering each candidate spelling.