Constructing and Using Broad-coverage Lexical Resource for Enhancing Morphological Analysis of Arabic

Majdi Sawalha, Eric Atwell

Abstract
Broad-coverage language resources which provide prior linguistic knowledge must improve the accuracy and the performance of NLP applications. We are constructing a broad-coverage lexical resource to improve the accuracy of morphological analyzers and part-of-speech taggers of Arabic text. Over the past 1200 years, many different kinds of Arabic language lexicons were constructed; these lexicons are different in ordering, size and aim or goal of construction. We collected 23 machine-readable lexicons, which are freely available on the web. We combined lexical resources into one large broad-coverage lexical resource by extracting information from disparate formats and merging traditional Arabic lexicons. To evaluate the broad-coverage lexical resource we computed coverage over the Qur’an, the Corpus of Contemporary Arabic, and a sample from the Arabic Web Corpus, using two methods. Counting exact word matches between test corpora and lexicon scored about 65-68%; Arabic has a rich morphology with many combinations of roots, affixes and clitics, so about a third of words in the corpora did not have an exact match in the lexicon. The second approach is to compute coverage in terms of use in a lemmatizer program, which strips clitics to look for a match for the underlying lexeme; this scored about 82-85%.
Anthology ID:
L10-1200
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/287_Paper.pdf
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Majdi Sawalha and Eric Atwell. 2010. Constructing and Using Broad-coverage Lexical Resource for Enhancing Morphological Analysis of Arabic. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Constructing and Using Broad-coverage Lexical Resource for Enhancing Morphological Analysis of Arabic (Sawalha & Atwell, LREC 2010)
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http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/287_Paper.pdf
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