This paper aims to implement what is referred to as the collocation of the Arabic keywords approach for extracting formulaic sequences (FSs) in the form of high frequency but semantically regular formulas that are not restricted to any syntactic construction or semantic domain. The study applies several distributional semantic models in order to automatically extract relevant FSs related to Arabic keywords. The data sets used in this experiment are rendered from a new developed corpus-based Arabic wordlist consisting of 5,189 lexical items which represent a variety of modern standard Arabic (MSA) genres and regions, the new wordlist being based on an overlapping frequency based on a comprehensive comparison of four large Arabic corpora with a total size of over 8 billion running words. Empirical n-best precision evaluation methods are used to determine the best association measures (AMs) for extracting high frequency and meaningful FSs. The gold standard reference FSs list was developed in previous studies and manually evaluated against well-established quantitative and qualitative criteria. The results demonstrate that the MI.log_f AM achieved the highest results in extracting significant FSs from the large MSA corpus, while the T-score association measure achieved the worst results.

Inspired by the Oxford Children’s Corpus, we have developed a prototype corpus of Arabic texts written and/or selected for children. Our Arabic Children’s Corpus of 2950 documents and nearly 2 million words has been collected manually from the web during a 3-month project. It is of high quality, and contains a range of different children’s genres based on sources located, including classic tales from The Arabian Nights, and popular fictional characters such as Goha. We anticipate that the current and subsequent versions of our corpus will lead to interesting studies in text classification, language use, and ideology in children’s texts.

In this paper, we focus on the prosodic effect of qalqalah or “vibration” applied to a subset of Arabic consonants under certain constraints during correct Qur’anic recitation or taǧwīd, using our Boundary-Annotated Qur’an dataset of 77430 words (Brierley et al 2012; Sawalha et al 2014). These qalqalah events are rule-governed and are signified orthographically in the Arabic script. Hence they can be given abstract definition in the form of regular expressions and thus located and collected automatically. High frequency qalqalah content words are also found to be statistically significant discriminators or keywords when comparing Meccan and Medinan chapters in the Qur’an using a state-of-the-art Visual Analytics toolkit: Semantic Pathways. Thus we hypothesise that qalqalah prosody is one way of highlighting salient items in the text. Finally, we implement Arabic transcription technology (Brierley et al under review; Sawalha et al forthcoming) to create a qalqalah pronunciation guide where each word is transcribed phonetically in IPA and mapped to its chapter-verse ID. This is funded research under the EPSRC “Working Together” theme.

We train and test two probabilistic taggers for Arabic phrase break prediction on a purpose-built, “gold standard”, boundary-annotated and PoS-tagged Qur'an corpus of 77430 words and 8230 sentences. In a related LREC paper (Brierley et al., 2012), we cover dataset build. Here we report on comparative experiments with off-the-shelf N-gram and HMM taggers and coarse-grained feature sets for syntax and prosody, where the task is to predict boundary locations in an unseen test set stripped of boundary annotations by classifying words as breaks or non-breaks. The preponderance of non-breaks in the training data sets a challenging baseline success rate: 85.56%. However, we achieve significant gains in accuracy with the trigram tagger, and significant gains in performance recognition of minority class instances with both taggers via Balanced Classification Rate. This is initial work on a long-term research project to produce annotation schemes, language resources, algorithms, and applications for Classical and Modern Standard Arabic.

A boundary-annotated and part-of-speech tagged corpus is a prerequisite for developing phrase break classifiers. Boundary annotations in English speech corpora are descriptive, delimiting intonation units perceived by the listener. We take a novel approach to phrase break prediction for Arabic, deriving our prosodic annotation scheme from Tajwīd (recitation) mark-up in the Qur'an which we then interpret as additional text-based data for computational analysis. This mark-up is prescriptive, and signifies a widely-used recitation style, and one of seven original styles of transmission. Here we report on version 1.0 of our Boundary-Annotated Qur'an dataset of 77430 words and 8230 sentences, where each word is tagged with prosodic and syntactic information at two coarse-grained levels. In (Sawalha et al., 2012), we use the dataset in phrase break prediction experiments. This research is part of a larger-scale project to produce annotation schemes, language resources, algorithms, and applications for Classical and Modern Standard Arabic.

We have previously reported on ProPOSEL, a purpose-built Prosody and PoS English Lexicon compatible with the Python Natural Language ToolKit. ProPOSEC is a new corpus research resource built using this lexicon, intended for distribution with the Aix-MARSEC dataset. ProPOSEC comprises multi-level parallel annotations, juxtaposing prosodic and syntactic information from different versions of the Spoken English Corpus, with canonical dictionary forms, in a query format optimized for Perl, Python, and text processing programs. The order and content of fields in the text file is as follows: (1) Aix-MARSEC file number; (2) word; (3) LOB PoS-tag; (4) C5 PoS-tag; (5) Aix SAM-PA phonetic transcription; (6) SAM-PA phonetic transcription from ProPOSEL; (7) syllable count; (8) lexical stress pattern; (9) default content or function word tag; (10) DISC stressed and syllabified phonetic transcription; (11) alternative DISC representation, incorporating lexical stress pattern; (12) nested arrays of phonemes and tonic stress marks from Aix. As an experimental dataset, ProPOSEC can be used to study correlations between these annotation tiers, where significant findings are then expressed as additional features for phrasing models integral to Text-to-Speech and Speech Recognition. As a training set, ProPOSEC can be used for machine learning tasks in Information Retrieval and Speech Understanding systems.

ProPOSEL is a prototype prosody and PoS (part-of-speech) English lexicon for Language Engineering, derived from the following language resources: the computer-usable dictionary CUVPlus, the CELEX-2 database, the Carnegie-Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary, and the BNC, LOB and Penn Treebank PoS-tagged corpora. The lexicon is designed for the target application of prosodic phrase break prediction but is also relevant to other machine learning and language engineering tasks. It supplements the existing record structure for wordform entries in CUVPlus with syntactic annotations from rival PoS-tagging schemes, mapped to fields for default closed and open-class word categories and for lexical stress patterns representing the rhythmic structure of wordforms and interpreted as potential new text-based features for automatic phrase break classifiers. The current version of the lexicon comes as a textfile of 104052 separate entries and is intended for distribution with the Natural Language ToolKit; it is therefore accompanied by supporting Python software for manipulating the data so that it can be used for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and corpus-based research in speech synthesis and speech recognition.