A Pilot Arabic CCGbank

Stephen A. Boxwell, Chris Brew


Abstract
We describe a process for converting the Penn Arabic Treebank into the CCG formalism. Previous efforts have yielded CCGbanks in English, German, and Turkish, thus opening these languages to the sophisticated computational tools developed for CCG and enabling further cross-linguistic development. Conversion from a context free grammar treebank to a CCGbank is a four stage process: head finding, argument classification, binarization, and category conversion. In the process of implementing a basic CCGbank conversion algorithm, we reveal properties of Arabic grammar that interfere with conversion, such as subject topicalization, genitive constructions, relative clauses, and optional pronominal subjects. All of these problematic phenomena can be resolved in a variety of ways - we discuss advantages and disadvantages of each in their respective sections. We detail these and describe our categorial analysis of each of these Arabic grammatical phenomena in depth, as well as technical details on their integration into the conversion algorithm.
Anthology ID:
L10-1429
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/623_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stephen A. Boxwell and Chris Brew. 2010. A Pilot Arabic CCGbank. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Pilot Arabic CCGbank (Boxwell & Brew, LREC 2010)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/623_Paper.pdf