Lost in Variation: An Unsupervised Methodology for Mining Lexico-syntactic Patterns in Middle Arabic Texts

Julien JB Bezançon, Rimane Karam, Gaël Lejeune


Abstract
While MSA and some dialects of Arabic have been extensively studied in NLP, Middle Arabic is still very much unknown to the field. However, Middle Arabic holds issues that are still not covered: it is characterized by variation since it mixes standard features, colloquial ones, as well as features that belong to neither of the two. Here, we introduce a methodology to identify, extract and rank variations of 13 manually retrieved formulas. Those formulas come from the nine first booklets of S ̄IRAT AL-MALIK AL-Z. ̄AHIR BAYBAR S., a corpus of Damascene popular literature written in Middle Arabic and composed of 53,843 sentences. In total, we ranked 20, sequences according to their similarity with the original formulas on multiple linguistic layers. We noticed that the variations in these formulas occur in a lexical, morphological and graphical level, but in opposition, the semantic and syntactic levels remain strictly invariable.
Anthology ID:
2025.wacl-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Saad Ezzini, Hamza Alami, Ismail Berrada, Abdessamad Benlahbib, Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Salima Lamsiyah, Hatim Derrouz, Amal Haddad Haddad, Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Ruslan Mitkov, Paul Rayson
Venues:
WACL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25–37
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.wacl-1.3/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julien JB Bezançon, Rimane Karam, and Gaël Lejeune. 2025. Lost in Variation: An Unsupervised Methodology for Mining Lexico-syntactic Patterns in Middle Arabic Texts. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4), pages 25–37, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Lost in Variation: An Unsupervised Methodology for Mining Lexico-syntactic Patterns in Middle Arabic Texts (Bezançon et al., WACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.wacl-1.3.pdf