Arabic Morphology Using Only Finite-State Operations

What it is about

The paper shows that Arabic root-and-pattern morphology can be written with finite-state operations alone, and that this is implemented in a large analyser and generator at Xerox. A root is a regular language (the three consonants in order, with anything between them), a pattern is a template over consonant and vowel slots, and a vowel melody is a regular expression. A stem is the intersection of root, pattern and vocalisation. Prefixes and suffixes are concatenated to the stems, and filters are composed on top to remove illegal combinations (an article cannot take an indefinite ending, a preposition takes only genitive). Sixty-six variation rules map abstract strings to spelling. The system has 4,930 hand-coded roots and generates over 72 million fully voweled forms, and it reads unvoweled, partly voweled and fully voweled text. The paper gives no accuracy figures; its claim is about expressive power.

Ideas

I1. Filter instead of rewriting: let the lexicon overgenerate and compose a filter that forbids illegal clitic combinations (an article with an indefinite ending, a preposition with a nominative or accusative). For tools/hbo, the prefix and suffix tables could be checked with such a filter, so that a vav, bet, lamed or mem prefix cannot combine with a suffix the grammar forbids.
I2. A root as a subsequence language: k-t-b is the set of strings that contain k, t, b in that order with anything between. In the unpointed mode of tools/hbo, match a lemma's consonants this way against the unvoweled token, which allows for inserted matres lectionis.
I3. A test: the same word spelled unvoweled, partly voweled and fully voweled must receive the same analysis. Build such triples from the Hebrew Bible text (MACULA) and report, per run, how often tools/hbo agrees with itself.

For Mova

I1 goes into Pronouns, particles and prepositions (prefix and suffix legality) and into the segmenter of tools/hbo. I2 goes into the unpointed mode of tools/hbo. I3 is a measure for tools/hbo, pointed against unpointed input.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/1621753.1621763

@inproceedings{beesley1998arabic,
  title = {{Arabic Morphology Using Only Finite-State Operations}},
  author = {Beesley, Kenneth R.},
  booktitle = {Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages},
  year = {1998},
  doi = {10.3115/1621753.1621763},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1621753.1621763}
}

References

29 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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