Computational Morphology and Lexicography Modeling of Modern Standard Arabic Nominals

What it is about

The paper models Modern Standard Arabic nouns, adjectives and elatives inside the CAMeL Morph framework (Habash et al., 2022), an open project that uses compatibility rules between allomorphs and an editable lexicon. It lists the nominal problems first. The 28 default nominal suffixes map to many of the 54 feature combinations of gender, number, case and state; for example, the feminine plural suffix -aAti covers four combinations. Some suffixes contradict the gender and number of the noun, and broken plurals mark number by pattern and need linking to their singular lemma. The abstract claims better accuracy and consistency than SAMA, a widely used database. I read the paper up to the nominal morphology section only, so no evaluation figures are given here.

Ideas

• I1. Make suffixes set-valued. Store each suffix with all the feature bundles it can express, and let context choose, instead of one default meaning per suffix. For The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral, a noun's gender and number come from the lemma and the suffix is a candidate set, checked by agreement in the tree.
• I2. Link broken plurals to their lemma. A broken plural is then reached from the singular lemma, not from a suffix rule. Test it: take the MACULA noun lemmas, count how many plurals are reached by pattern rather than suffix, and check the links against macula dict.
• I3. Score form and function apart. Build a mismatch set of nouns whose suffix disagrees with their features, and score it separately from the default cases. The paper's examples are a starting point; the Hebrew set should come from attested texts in treebanks/hbo/ptnk.

For Mova

I1 and I2 go into The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral, with I2 checked against tools/macula dict. I3 is a test set built from treebanks/hbo/ptnk.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2024.findings-eacl.72

@inproceedings{khairallah2024computational,
  title = {{Computational Morphology and Lexicography Modeling of Modern Standard Arabic Nominals}},
  author = {Khairallah, Christian and Marzouk, Reham and Khalifa, Salam and Nassar, Mayar and Habash, Nizar},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.findings-eacl.72},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.findings-eacl.72}
}

References

37 references, 10 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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