Developing a System for Converting a Numeral Text into a Digit Number: Abacus Application

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, we will present a novel and the first approach to transforming written Arabic numeral word format into a string of digits according to proposed Arabic numeral rules. In this work, we relied mainly on the Arabic stemmer to determine the digit number, where we proposed a set of stems for the main numbers. The proposed approach covers all problems associated with Arabic numeral texts, including different numeral word shapes and unordered sentences. That is, a textual number could be written in more than one format; moreover, we deal with Arabic accents. In addition, we propose to deal with simple spelling errors and using similarities to find the nearest correct word. The proposed approach covers all possible text numbers in the range of one to millions. Tests have been executed using a possible case from context numeral in the range above, and the experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed approach is promising in the sense that it provides an efficient and error-free transformation. Finally, we built an Android mobile-based application that uses the proposed approach to transform between three different formats: digits, numeral texts, and Abacus.