Fine-Grain Morphological Analyzer and Part-of-Speech Tagger for Arabic Text

Majdi Sawalha, Eric Atwell

Abstract
Morphological analyzers and part-of-speech taggers are key technologies for most text analysis applications. Our aim is to develop a part-of-speech tagger for annotating a wide range of Arabic text formats, domains and genres including both vowelized and non-vowelized text. Enriching the text with linguistic analysis will maximize the potential for corpus re-use in a wide range of applications. We foresee the advantage of enriching the text with part-of-speech tags of very fine-grained grammatical distinctions, which reflect expert interest in syntax and morphology, but not specific needs of end-users, because end-user applications are not known in advance. In this paper we review existing Arabic Part-of-Speech Taggers and tag-sets, and illustrate four different Arabic PoS tag-sets for a sample of Arabic text from the Quran. We describe the detailed fine-grained morphological feature tag set of Arabic, and the fine-grained Arabic morphological analyzer algorithm. We faced practical challenges in applying the morphological analyzer to the 100-million-word Web Arabic Corpus: we had to port the software to the National Grid Service, adapt the analyser to cope with spelling variations and errors, and utilise a Broad-Coverage Lexical Resource combining 23 traditional Arabic lexicons. Finally we outline the construction of a Gold Standard for comparative evaluation.
Anthology ID:
L10-1196
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/282_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Majdi Sawalha and Eric Atwell. 2010. Fine-Grain Morphological Analyzer and Part-of-Speech Tagger for Arabic Text. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Fine-Grain Morphological Analyzer and Part-of-Speech Tagger for Arabic Text (Sawalha & Atwell, LREC 2010)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/282_Paper.pdf
PDF Search