Arabic Parsing Using Grammar Transforms

Lamia Tounsi, Josef van Genabith


Abstract
We investigate Arabic Context Free Grammar parsing with dependency annotation comparing lexicalised and unlexicalised parsers. We study how morphosyntactic as well as function tag information percolation in the form of grammar transforms (Johnson, 1998, Kulick et al., 2006) affects the performance of a parser and helps dependency assignment. We focus on the three most frequent functional tags in the Arabic Penn Treebank: subjects, direct objects and predicates . We merge these functional tags with their phrasal categories and (where appropriate) percolate case information to the non-terminal (POS) category to train the parsers. We then automatically enrich the output of these parsers with full dependency information in order to annotate trees with Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) f-structure equations with produce f-structures, i.e. attribute-value matrices approximating to basic predicate-argument-adjunct structure representations. We present a series of experiments evaluating how well lexicalized, history-based, generative (Bikel) as well as latent variable PCFG (Berkeley) parsers cope with the enriched Arabic data. We measure quality and coverage of both the output trees and the generated LFG f-structures. We show that joint functional and morphological information percolation improves both the recovery of trees as well as dependency results in the form of LFG f-structures.
Anthology ID:
L10-1564
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/819_Paper.pdf
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Cite (ACL):
Lamia Tounsi and Josef van Genabith. 2010. Arabic Parsing Using Grammar Transforms. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Arabic Parsing Using Grammar Transforms (Tounsi & van Genabith, LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/819_Paper.pdf