Before Search Comes Normalization
TL;DR for operators A voice product cannot safely assume that Arabic speech recognition output and canonical Quranic text are already comparable strings. The paper constructs a 2,290-pair mapping between Uthmani word forms and Standard Arabic, then embeds that resource in a deterministic normalization and retrieval system.1 The practical result is substantial but bounded. After normalization, 5,669 of 6,236 verses—90.9%—become identical across the two written forms. The validator passes 122 of 124 cases in its released evaluation suite. Yet both failures come from the same architectural choice: an ASR substitution can accidentally create an exact match for the wrong verse, and the system accepts that candidate before comparing alternatives. ...