Predicting Phrase Breaks in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic Text

Majdi Sawalha, Claire Brierley, Eric Atwell

Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
L12-1091
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3868–3872
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/239_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Majdi Sawalha, Claire Brierley, and Eric Atwell. 2012. Predicting Phrase Breaks in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic Text. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 3868–3872, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Phrase Breaks in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic Text (Sawalha et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/239_Paper.pdf
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