Improving Arabic Diacritization through Syntactic Analysis

What it is about

MADAMIRA chooses a morphological analysis from a ranked list for each word, but it looks only at a small window of neighbouring words and has no syntax. Its case and state choices are therefore often impossible in the sentence (a genitive after a verb, a construct noun followed by a non-genitive). The authors parse the sentence with a MaltParser model trained on the Columbia Arabic Treebank, then correct MADAMIRA's case and state with two components: hand-written case rules (a default accusative, roots take nominative, prepositional objects and idafa children take genitive, agreement copied from modified and conjoined nominals) and a decision-tree classifier over unlexicalized morphological and tree features. Combining the rules and the classifier gives the best result. On the blind test set, word-level diacritization rises from 88.1% to 90.6% and nominal diacritization from 82.4% to 87.6%. Of the first 100 remaining errors, about a third come from wrong parses.

Ideas

• I1. Agreement as a deterministic pass over the tree: an adjective copies the case of the noun it modifies, and a conjunct copies the case of the head, applied after case assignment and re-applied once or twice. Written in Rust over UD-style trees, this is a rule with a measurable effect.
• I2. Re-rank, do not generate: keep the segmenter's or lexicon's ranked analyses and choose the first one that is consistent with the parse (same number of clitics, same case). Their retagging step does exactly this and shows that it changes few tokens but many nominals.
• I3. Their error categories (syntactic tree errors, missing diacritics in the gold, out-of-vocabulary forms) as a fixed report for tools/hbo, so each change is counted against the same categories.

For Mova

I1 goes into Syntax: the clause and the sentence (agreement) and The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral (case and the construct state). I2 is a candidate rule for choosing among segmentations in tools/hbo once gparse has a tree. I3 is a test for tools/hbo evaluation.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/d15-1152

@inproceedings{shahrour2015improving,
  title = {{Improving Arabic Diacritization through Syntactic Analysis}},
  author = {Shahrour, Anas and Khalifa, Salam and Habash, Nizar},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/d15-1152},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d15-1152}
}

References

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