Morphological Analysis and Generation of Arabic Nouns: A Morphemic Functional Approach

Mohamed Altantawy, Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, Ibrahim Saleh


Abstract
MAGEAD is a morphological analyzer and generator for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and its dialects. We introduced MAGEAD in previous work with an implementation of MSA and Levantine Arabic verbs. In this paper, we port that system to MSA nominals (nouns and adjectives), which are far more complex to model than verbs. Our system is a functional morphological analyzer and generator, i.e., it analyzes to and generates from a representation consisting of a lexeme and linguistic feature-value pairs, where the features are syntactically (and perhaps semantically) meaningful, rather than just morphologically. A detailed evaluation of the current implementation comparing it to a commonly used morphological analyzer shows that it has good morphological coverage with precision and recall scores in the 90s. An error analysis reveals that the majority of recall and precision errors are problems in the gold standard or a result of the discrepancy between different models of form-based/functional morphology.
Anthology ID:
L10-1305
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/442_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohamed Altantawy, Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, and Ibrahim Saleh. 2010. Morphological Analysis and Generation of Arabic Nouns: A Morphemic Functional Approach. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Morphological Analysis and Generation of Arabic Nouns: A Morphemic Functional Approach (Altantawy et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/442_Paper.pdf