Abstract
We present a computational approach to Arabic morphology description that draws from Lexeme-Based Morphology (Aronoff, 1994; Beard, 1995), giving priority to stems and granting a subordinate status to inflectional prefixes and suffixes. Although the morphology of Arabic is non-concatenative, we make the process of generating inflected forms concatenative by separating the generation of stems from that of other inflectional affixes. Our approach is implemented in an extension of the MORPHĒ tool (Leavitt, 1994), which has been enhanced in order to provide a representational formalism that embodies Lexeme-Based Morphology theory and minimizes the number of rules required for the description of Arabic morphology
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abu Al-Suud, A. (1971). Al-Faisal fi Alwaan Al-Jumuu [The Distinction among the Colors of the Plurals]. Cairo: Daar Al-maarif.
Aronoff, M. (1994). Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Badawi, E., Carter, M.G. & Gully, A. (2004). Modern Written Arabic: A Comprehensive Grammar. New York: Routledge.
Beard, R. (1995). Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology: A General Theory of Inflection and Word Formation. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Beesley, K. (1996). Arabic Finite-State Morphological Analysis and Generation. In Proceedings of COLING-96 (Vol. 1, pp. 89–94).
Beesley, K. (1998). Consonant Spreading in Arabic Stems. In Proceedings of COLING-98 (pp. 117–123).
Cavalli-Sforza, V. & Soudi A. (2003). Enhancements to a Morphological Generator to Capture Arabic Morphology. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Social Communication (pp. 565–570), Center of Applied Linguistics, Santiago de Cuba.
Cavalli-Sforza, V. & Soudi A. (2006). IMORPHĒ: An Inheritance and Equivalence Based Morphology Description Compiler. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-06, pp.13–18), Genova, Italy.
Cavalli-Sforza, V., Soudi, A. & Mitamura, T. (2000). Arabic Morphology Generation Using a Concatenative Strategy. In Proceedings of the 1st Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-00, pp. 86–93), Seattle.
Guerssel, M. & Lowenstamm, J. (1996). Ablaut in Classical Arabic Measure 1 Active Verbal Forms. In Lecarme, J., Lowenstamm, J. & Shlonsky, U. (Eds.), Studies in Afroasiatic Grammar (pp. 123–134). The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.
Kay, M. (1987). Non-concatenative Finite-state Morphology. In Proceedings of the Third Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 2–10), Copenhagen, Denmark.
Kiraz, G. (1994). Multi-tape Two-level Morphology: A Case study in Semitic Non-Linear Morphology. In Proceedings of COLING-94 (Vol. 1, pp. 180–186).
Kiraz, G. (1998). Arabic Computational Morphology in the West. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference and Exhibition on Multi-lingual Computing, Cambridge.
Kiraz, G. (2000). A Multi-tiered Nonlinear Morphology using Multi-tape Finite State Auto-mata: A Case Study on Syriac and Arabic. In Computational Linguistics, 26(1), 77–105.
Koskenniemi, K. (1983). Two-level morphology: A General Computational Model for Word-Form Recognition and Production. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Helsinki.
Lane, E.W. (1863–93). An Arabic-English Lexicon (8 volumes). London: Williams and Norgate.
Leavitt, J.R. (1994). MORPHĒ: A Morphological Rule Compiler. Technical Report, CMU-CMT-94-MEMO.
Levy, M.M. (1971). The Plural of the Noun in Modern Standard Arabic. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Michigan.
McCarthy, J. (1979). On Stress and Syllabification. Linguistic Inquiry, 10, 443–465.
McCarthy, J.A. (1981). Prosodic Theory of Non-Concatenative Morphology. Linguistic Inquiry, 12, 373–418.
Murtonen, A. (1964). Broken Plurals, the Origin and Development of the System. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Nyberg, E. & Mitamura, T. (1992). The KANT system: Fast, accurate, high-quality translation in practical domains. Proceedings of COLING-92 (pp. 1254–1258).
Ratcliffe, R.R. (1992). The Broken Plural Problem in Arabic, Semitic and Afroasiatic: A Solution Based on the Diachronic Application of Prosodic Analysis. Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University.
Ratcliffe, R.R. (1998). The ’Broken’ Plural Problem in Arabic and Comparative Semitic: Allomorphy and Analogy in Non-concatenative Morphology. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Soudi, A., Cavalli-Sforza, V. & Jamari, A. (2001). A Computational Lexeme-based Treatment of Arabic Morphology. In Proceedings of the ACL-01 Workshop on Arabic Language Processing: Status and Prospects (pp. 155–162), Toulouse, France.
Soudi, A., Cavalli-Sforza, V. & Jamari, A. (2002). The Arabic Noun System Generation. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on The Processing of Arabic (pp. 69–87), University of Manouba, Tunisia.
Stump, G.T. (1993). On Rules of Referral. Language, 69(3), 449–479.
Wehr, H. (1980). A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Milton Cowan, J., Ed., 4th ed.). Ithaca, NY: Spoken Language Services.
Zwicky, A. (1985). How to Describe Inflection. Berkeley Linguistic Society, 372–386.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cavalli-Sforza, V., Soudi, A. (2007). Arabic Computational Morphology: A Trade-off Between Multiple Operations and Multiple Stems. In: Soudi, A., Bosch, A.v., Neumann, G. (eds) Arabic Computational Morphology. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6046-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6046-5_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-6045-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-6046-5
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)