MAQAM: A Richly Annotated Corpus for Quranic Arabic Morphological Analysis and Disambiguation

Mostafa Saeed, Mohammad Amjad, Mahmoud Kassem, Rawan Bondok, Mayar Nassar, Adel Mahmoud Wizani, Salman Elgamal, Mahmoud Reda, Nizar Habash


Abstract
Quranic Arabic poses important challenges for Arabic NLP due to its distinctive morphology, syntax, and orthography. We present MAQAM, a richly annotated Morphosyntactic Arabic Quranic Analysis and Modeling resource covering the entire Quran, providing 22 lexical, inflectional, and clitic features for every word. The resource is constructed through a semi-automatic pipeline combining feature enrichment, morphological synchronization, and expert manual annotation and validation. We further evaluate Quranic morphosyntactic disambiguation under a realistic setting where the input may be represented in either the Uthmani or Imla’i script, and investigate cross-domain transfer between Quranic Arabic and MSA. Our results show that MSA and Quranic resources are complementary for Quranic disambiguation, with the best performance obtained by combining MSA training data, Quran-specific analyzers, and both script representations, whereas for MSA, only integrating Quranic resources provide modest gains. We make MAQAM publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-main.11
Volume:
Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Tamer Elsayed, Houda Bouamor, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Hend Al-Khalifa, Ahmed Abdelali, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Abdellah El Mekki, Kareem Darwish, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Hamzah Luqman, Salam Khalifa, Samar Magdy, Zaid Alyafeai, Injy Hamed, Wajdi Zaghouani, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
ArabicNLP
SIG:
SIGARAB
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
151–163
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-main.11/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mostafa Saeed, Mohammad Amjad, Mahmoud Kassem, Rawan Bondok, Mayar Nassar, Adel Mahmoud Wizani, Salman Elgamal, Mahmoud Reda, and Nizar Habash. 2026. MAQAM: A Richly Annotated Corpus for Quranic Arabic Morphological Analysis and Disambiguation. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 151–163, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MAQAM: A Richly Annotated Corpus for Quranic Arabic Morphological Analysis and Disambiguation (Saeed et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-main.11.pdf