Identifying Broken Plurals, Irregular Gender, and Rationality in Arabic Text

What it is about

Arabic words can carry a mismatch between form and function: a broken plural looks singular, and some nouns have a feminine form with masculine agreement, or the reverse. Rationality (human vs non-human) has no morphological mark at all, yet it controls agreement. The authors predict these functional gender, number and rationality values in context, on a corpus of about 16.6K sentences derived from the Penn Arabic Treebank part 3. They compare a maximum-likelihood model with back-off (MLE) against a support-vector sequence tagger (Yamcha), and add orthographic, morphological and syntactic features. MLE is best for words seen in training (97.0% on all three values), Yamcha with syntax is best for unseen words (76.2%), and a combination reaches 94.9% overall, against 89.3% for the MLE baseline.

Ideas

• I1. Use a back-off chain as the lookup rule for seen words: word form, then lemma plus POS, then POS alone, then the global most common value. Each step is a table, so the whole thing is deterministic and can say which step fired. For tools/hbo this is the lookup that runs before any sequence model.
• I2. Enforce one value per word-lemma-POS triple after tagging. The paper's consistency filter is a plain post-pass over the output. In Mova it is a BTreeMap pass over the tagged tokens, with no learning needed.
• I3. Report seen and unseen words separately for every morphological table. Here the seen-word score is 97% and the unseen score is 21% for the same lookup. A table that reports only the total would hide this, so The lexicon should state both numbers for any Hebrew table.

For Mova

I1 and I2 apply to the noun-morphology lookup in tools/hbo and to The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral. I3 is a measurement rule for The lexicon. The rationality class is not carried over: it is a feature of Arabic agreement, and Biblical Hebrew would need its own check on treebanks/hbo/ptnk first.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{alkuhlani2012identifying,
  title = {{Identifying Broken Plurals, Irregular Gender, and Rationality in Arabic Text}},
  author = {Alkuhlani, Sarah and Habash, Nizar},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/E12-1069/}
}

References

29 references, 9 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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