Arabic is known for the richness and complexity of its morphology and syntax. This is why Arabic has always posed a challenge for computational processing and served as a hard testing ground for new methods and models. This book provides an in-depth study of the Arabic morphology and syntax from a theoretical and computational point of view with emphasis on the ambiguity problem. The book discusses the different development strategies of Arabic morphological analysis and explains the architecture of a new powerful morphological analyser that has a significantly fewer number of ambiguities. It investigates the interesting phenomena of multi-word expressions with their varying categories, structures and degree of semantic opaqueness. The book formulates a description of the main syntactic structures of Arabic, examining word order, agreement, long-distance dependencies, and copula constructions. The book tackles the daunting problem of syntactic disambiguation. It identifies the sources of ambiguities and explores the full range of tools and mechanisms for ambiguity management. The book is very useful for researchers and students wanting an appreciation of the Arabic language system.
This is the first comprehensive overview of computational approaches to Arabic morphology. The subtitle aims to reflect that widely different computational approaches to the Arabic morphological system have been proposed. The book provides a showcase of the most advanced language technologies applied to one of the most vexing problems in linguistics. It covers knowledge-based and empirical-based approaches.
This book provides system developers and researchers in natural language processing and computational linguistics with the necessary background information for working with the Arabic language. The goal is to introduce Arabic linguistic phenomena and review the state-of-the-art in Arabic processing. The book discusses Arabic script, phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and semantics, with a final chapter on machine translation issues. The chapter sizes correspond more or less to what is linguistically distinctive about Arabic, with morphology getting the lion's share, followed by Arabic script. No previous knowledge of Arabic is needed. This book is designed for computer scientists and linguists alike. The focus of the book is on Modern Standard Arabic; however, notes on practical issues related to Arabic dialects and languages written in the Arabic script are presented in different chapters. Table of Contents: What is "Arabic"? / Arabic Script / Arabic Phonology and Orthography / Arabic Morphology / Computational Morphology Tasks / Arabic Syntax / A Note on Arabic Semantics / A Note on Arabic and Machine Translation
In view of the great upsurge of interest in syntax in recent years, it is remarkable that there are so few studies of Arabic syntax, and the works of a diachronic orientation are virtually nonexistent. The main portion of this book is historical, dealing with fundamental mechanisms of syntactic and semantic change. Here Bloch has made a substantial contribution to the historical syntax of Arabic. Throughout the book the phenomena are viewed form a broad perspective that takes into account evidence not only from all periods and genres of Arabic (Ancient Poetic, Koranic, Classical, Middle, Modern Literary and Colloquial) but also from other Semitic (and occasionally non-Semitic). In the second printing are almost exclusively corrections of misprints and other minor alterations made.
This handbook of computational linguistics, written for academics, graduate students and researchers, provides a state-of-the-art reference to one of the most active and productive fields in linguistics.
Future Communication Technology and Engineering is a collection of papers presented at the 2014 International Conference on Future Communication Technology and Engineering (Shenzhen, China 16-17 November 2014). Covering a wide range of topics (communication systems, automation and control engineering, electrical engineering), the book includes the
This book and its companion volumes, LNCS volumes 9140, 9141 and 9142, constitute the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, ICSI 2015 held in conjunction with the Second BRICS Congress on Computational Intelligence, CCI 2015, held in Beijing, China in June 2015. The 161 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 294 submissions. The papers are organized in 28 cohesive sections covering all major topics of swarm intelligence and computational intelligence research and development, such as novel swarm-based optimization algorithms and applications; particle swarm opt8imization; ant colony optimization; artificial bee colony algorithms; evolutionary and genetic algorithms; differential evolution; brain storm optimization algorithm; biogeography based optimization; cuckoo search; hybrid methods; multi-objective optimization; multi-agent systems and swarm robotics; Neural networks and fuzzy methods; data mining approaches; information security; automation control; combinatorial optimization algorithms; scheduling and path planning; machine learning; blind sources separation; swarm interaction behavior; parameters and system optimization; neural networks; evolutionary and genetic algorithms; fuzzy systems; forecasting algorithms; classification; tracking analysis; simulation; image and texture analysis; dimension reduction; system optimization; segmentation and detection system; machine translation; virtual management and disaster analysis.
This volume presents a comprehensive study of Arabic morpho-phonology with its basics and intricacies, by making available a wide range of material from the 8th century A.D. until our days and exploring the main topics that arise. It uses as its point of departure an unused source: the end of the 13th century Marāḥ al-arwāḥ by Aḥmad b. ‘alī Mas‘ūd, which is critically edited and provided with an introduction, an English translation and an extensive commentary. It offers an analysis of many grammatical theories, paradigms, qur'anical citations, verses of poetry, dialectal variants and Semitic words and concludes with various indices that make the enormous body of information easily accessible.
We developed an original approach to Arabic traditional morphology, involving new concepts in Semitic lexicology, morphology, and grammar for standard written Arabic. This new methodology for handling the rich and complex Semitic languages is based on good practices in Finite-State technologies (FSA/FST) by using Unitex, a lexicon-based corpus processing suite. For verbs (Neme, 2011), I proposed an inflectional taxonomy that increases the lexicon readability and makes it easier for Arabic speakers and linguists to encode, correct, and update it. Traditional grammar defines inflectional verbal classes by using verbal pattern-classes and root-classes. In our taxonomy, traditional pattern-classes are reused, and root-classes are redefined into a simpler system. The lexicon of verbs covered more than 99% of an evaluation corpus. For nouns and adjectives (Neme, 2013), we went one step further in the adaptation of traditional morphology. First, while this tradition is based on derivational rules, we found our description on inflectional ones. Next, we keep the concepts of root and pattern, which is the backbone of the traditional Semitic model. Still, our breakthrough lies in the reversal of the traditional root-and-pattern Semitic model into a pattern-and-root model, which keeps small and orderly the set of pattern classes and root sub-classes. I elaborated a taxonomy for broken plural containing 160 inflectional classes, which simplifies ten times the encoding of broken plural. Since then, I elaborated comprehensive resources for Arabic. These resources are described in Neme and Paumier (2019). To take into account all aspects of the rich morphology of Arabic, I have completed our taxonomy with suffixal inflexional classes for regular plurals, adverbs, and other parts of speech (POS) to cover all the lexicon. In all, I identified around 1000 Semitic and suffixal inflectional classes implemented with concatenative and non-concatenative FST devices.From scratch, I created 76000 fully vowelized lemmas, and each one is associated with an inflectional class. These lemmas are inflected by using these 1000 FSTs, producing a fully inflected lexicon with more than 6 million forms. I extended this fully inflected resource using agglutination grammars to identify words composed of up to 5 segments, agglutinated around a core inflected verb, noun, adjective, or particle. The agglutination grammars extend the recognition to more than 500 million valid delimited word forms, partially or fully vowelized. The flat file size of 6 million forms is 340 megabytes (UTF-16). It is compressed then into 11 Mbytes before loading to memory for fast retrieval. The generation, compression, and minimization of the full-form lexicon take less than one minute on a common Unix laptop. The lexical coverage rate is more than 99%. The tagger speed is 5000 words/second, and more than 200 000 words/s, if the resources are preloaded/resident in the RAM. The accuracy and speed of our tools result from our systematic linguistic approach and from our choice to embrace the best practices in mathematical and computational methods. The lookup procedure is fast because we use Minimal Acyclic Deterministic Finite Automaton (Revuz, 1992) to compress the full-form dictionary, and because it has only constant strings and no embedded rules. The breakthrough of our linguistic approach remains principally on the reversal of the traditional root-and-pattern Semitic model into a pattern-and-root model.Nonetheless, our computational approach is based on good practices in Finite-State technologies (FSA/FST) as all the full-forms were computed in advance for accurate identification and to get the best from the FSA compression for fast and efficient lookups.
