arabnamer 0.1.1

Arabic name transliteration and similarity — convert English names to Arabic (and score Arabic name matches) with a gradient-boosted model trained on 22 K name pairs.

arabnamer — Arabic name transliteration & similarity

Convert English names to Arabic and score Arabic name matches — offline, in one line of Python.

from arabnamer import translit, similarity

translit("Mohammed Ali").arabic        # → 'محمد علي'
translit("Ayman El Desouky").arabic    # → 'أيمن الدسوقي'

similarity("أحمد حسن", "احمد حسن")      # → (True, 100)

arabnamer solves the Arabic name transliteration problem — turning Mohammed Ali into محمد علي, and scoring matches between Arabic name variants (with hamza, tashkeel, taa-marbuta differences). It ships a 38 MB pruned XGBoost model trained on 22,798 English-Arabic name pairs (JRC-Names + Google Translate + manual audit) and reaches 98.4 % lenient accuracy on an independent MENA-names benchmark.

Built for: KYC / sanctions screening, library cataloguing, Arabic NLP preprocessing, search-relevance normalization, entity resolution across English and Arabic corpora.

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Install

pip install arabnamer

Works offline after install — the model is bundled (gzipped, ~38 MB). No external services, no API keys.

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Quick start

1. Transliterate English → Arabic

from arabnamer import translit, translit_batch

result = translit("Mohammed Ali")
print(result.arabic)    # 'محمد علي'
print(result.score)     # 0.0 (no reference supplied)
print(result.engine)    # 'xgboost'

# batch
results = translit_batch(["Ahmad Hassan", "Marwa Farag", "Ayman El Desouky"])
for r in results:
    print(f"{r.input:<25} -> {r.arabic}")

2. Score with a reference (lenient, normalized)

from arabnamer import translit

r = translit("Adham Saouli", reference="أدهم ساولي")
print(r.score)       # 100.0
print(r.accepted)    # True  (>= default threshold 85)

3. Arabic ↔ Arabic similarity (tashkeel / hamza / taa-marbuta insensitive)

from arabnamer import similarity

similarity("أحمد حسن", "احمد حسن")          # (True, 100)   hamza variant
similarity("مروة فرج", "مروه فرج")           # (True, 100)   taa-marbuta vs haa
similarity("محمد", "أحمد", threshold=75)     # (True, 75) — different names

4. Configurable: threshold + engine

from arabnamer import Transliterator

t = Transliterator(engine="model", threshold=90)   # stricter pass bar
t.translit("Mohammed Ali", reference="محمد علي")

# Rule-based engine (deterministic, dict-first)
t_rules = Transliterator(engine="rules")
t_rules.translit("Mohammed Ali")

# Hybrid: dict -> model -> rules fallback
t_hybrid = Transliterator(engine="hybrid")

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How accurate is it?

Benchmarked on 25 MENA-region names (authors, journalists, public figures):

Metric	Score
Average lenient similarity	98.4
Pass rate (≥ 70)	25 / 25
Pass rate (≥ 90)	24 / 25
Exact match (= 100)	21 / 25

Model: XGBoost, 386 boosting rounds × 335 output classes, 34 input features per character (char IDs + position + phonetic class + bigram/trigram IDs). See benchmarks/REPORT.md for the full breakdown.

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What's inside this repo

arabnamer/
├── src/arabnamer/           # pip-installable library
│   ├── core/                # Transliterator orchestrator + Result
│   ├── prediction/          # XGBoost model loader + featurize
│   ├── rules/               # deterministic rule-based walker
│   ├── scoring/             # fuzzy match + Arabic normalizer
│   └── utils/               # tokenizer + dict lookup
│
├── model/                   # gzipped model + labels (ships in wheel)
├── dataset/                 # 22,798 EN -> AR name pairs (dict_FINAL.json)
├── training/                # scripts to retrain from scratch
├── tests/                   # smoke + benchmark eval
├── benchmarks/              # eval results + REPORT.md
└── docs/                    # data sources + architecture + API details

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Data sources

Training data comes from three open sources plus a manual audit pass. Full provenance in docs/data_sources.md. In summary:

Source	License	Contribution
JRC-Names (European Commission, multilingual name gazetteer)	EU open-data	primary EN/AR name pairs
Google Translate (via deep_translator)	generated text	fill-in for names absent from JRC
Claude (Anthropic) LLM fill	generated text	supplementary fill for DI-thesis-specific names
Manual audit + rule-based cleanup	—	phonetic-compatibility filter, hamza repair, outlier removal

Model and dataset are released under CC-BY-4.0 (attribution required). Library code is MIT.

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Reproducing the model

git clone https://github.com/sayedyousef/arabnamer
cd arabnamer
pip install -e ".[dev]"
cd training
python train_xgboost.py      # ~5 min on CPU, produces ~285 MB UBJ
python prune_trees.py        # ~1 min, saves pruned variants
python find_min_k.py         # ~30 sec, finds the smallest-identical model

XGBoost with multi-threaded histogram training is approximately (not bit-perfectly) deterministic. See training/README.md for the full note.

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Why this library exists

Arabic name handling is a real gap in open NLP tooling. Most Arabic libraries (PyArabic, arabic-reshaper, AraBERT, CAMeL Tools) focus on text — rendering, tokenisation, stemming. Proper-noun transliteration and fuzzy-matching of name variants (أحمد vs احمد vs Ahmad) is underserved.

arabnamer is the first open library specifically for:

• Arabic ↔ English name transliteration at the word level
• Arabic name similarity that's insensitive to hamza, tashkeel, taa-marbuta, and alef-maksura variants
• Offline, pip-installable — no API keys, no network, no LLM dependency

Typical use cases:

• KYC & sanctions screening — match Arabic names against English watchlists
• Library & archive cataloguing — normalize author names across MENA languages
• Search relevance — expand queries to cover Arabic-script variants
• Data integration — reconcile person entities across EN/AR CRMs

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Citation

If you use arabnamer in a paper, product, or research tool, please cite:

@software{yousef_arabnamer_2026,
  author  = {Yousef, Elsayed},
  title   = {arabnamer: Arabic name transliteration and similarity},
  year    = {2026},
  version = {0.1.0},
  url     = {https://github.com/sayedyousef/arabnamer},
}

A CITATION.cff file is included so GitHub's "Cite this repository" button works.

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Commercial support

For production deployments, custom models trained on your domain corpus, on-premise integration, or paid support:

[e-mail]

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License

• Source code (src/arabnamer/, training/): MIT License
• Dataset, model weights, test data: CC-BY-4.0 (attribution required)

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Acknowledgements

• JRC-Names — European Commission Joint Research Centre name gazetteer (primary training data)
• XGBoost — gradient-boosted tree library
• RapidFuzz — fast fuzzy string matching
• The thesis work this library was extracted from (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies)