In pro-drop language like Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and many others, unrealized (null) arguments in certain syntactic positions can refer to a previously introduced entity, and are thus called anaphoric zero pronouns. The existing resources for studying anaphoric zero pronoun interpretation are however still limited. In this paper, we use five data augmentation methods to generate and detect anaphoric zero pronouns automatically. We use the augmented data as additional training materials for two anaphoric zero pronoun systems for Arabic. Our experimental results show that data augmentation improves the performance of the two systems, surpassing the state-of-the-art results.

We present the Arabic dialect identification system that we used for the country-level subtask of the NADI challenge. Our model consists of three components: BiLSTM-CNN, character-level TF-IDF, and topic modeling features. We represent each tweet using these features and feed them into a deep neural network. We then add an effective heuristic that improves the overall performance. We achieved an F1-Macro score of 20.77% and an accuracy of 34.32% on the test set. The model was also evaluated on the Arabic Online Commentary dataset, achieving results better than the state-of-the-art.

Pro-drop languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Italian or Japanese allow morphologically null but referential arguments in certain syntactic positions, called anaphoric zero-pronouns. Much NLP work on anaphoric zero-pronouns (AZP) is based on gold mentions, but models for their identification are a fundamental prerequisite for their resolution in real-life applications. Such identification requires complex language understanding and knowledge of real-world entities. Transfer learning models, such as BERT, have recently shown to learn surface, syntactic, and semantic information,which can be very useful in recognizing AZPs. We propose a BERT-based multilingual model for AZP identification from predicted zero pronoun positions, and evaluate it on the Arabic and Chinese portions of OntoNotes 5.0. As far as we know, this is the first neural network model of AZP identification for Arabic; and our approach outperforms the stateof-the-art for Chinese. Experiment results suggest that BERT implicitly encode information about AZPs through their surrounding context.

No neural coreference resolver for Arabic exists, in fact we are not aware of any learning-based coreference resolver for Arabic since (Björkelund and Kuhn, 2014). In this paper, we introduce a coreference resolution system for Arabic based on Lee et al’s end-to-end architecture combined with the Arabic version of bert and an external mention detector. As far as we know, this is the first neural coreference resolution system aimed specifically to Arabic, and it substantially outperforms the existing state-of-the-art on OntoNotes 5.0 with a gain of 15.2 points conll F1. We also discuss the current limitations of the task for Arabic and possible approaches that can tackle these challenges.

In languages like Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and many others, predicate arguments in certain syntactic positions are not realized instead of being realized as overt pronouns, and are thus called zero- or null-pronouns. Identifying and resolving such omitted arguments is crucial to machine translation, information extraction and other NLP tasks, but depends heavily on semantic coherence and lexical relationships. We propose a BERT-based cross-lingual model for zero pronoun resolution, and evaluate it on the Arabic and Chinese portions of OntoNotes 5.0. As far as we know, ours is the first neural model of zero-pronoun resolution for Arabic; and our model also outperforms the state-of-the-art for Chinese. In the paper we also evaluate BERT feature extraction and fine-tune models on the task, and compare them with our model. We also report on an investigation of BERT layers indicating which layer encodes the most suitable representation for the task.