A Computational Lexicon of Contemporary Hebrew

What it is about

The authors present the Haifa Lexicon of Contemporary Hebrew, a public XML lexicon of about 21,400 entries (over 10,000 nouns, about 4,500 verbs and about 4,200 proper names), which they describe as the broadest publicly available Modern Hebrew lexicon. Each entry has a citation form, dotted, undotted and transliterated spellings, a script/register field, and, for verbs, a root and an inflection pattern; idiosyncratic plurals and spellings are listed as exceptions. The morphological analyser works by generation: about 474,000 inflected forms (before prefixes) are generated from the lexicon and stored in a database, so analysis is a lookup, and 174 prefix sequences are allowed. The lexicon was filled from HSpell (about 3,000 nouns and adjectives), the verb tables of Zdaqa (over 3,500 verbs), manual entry, and checks against newspaper text and generated derivations. The paper reports sizes and methods but no accuracy figures.

Ideas

• I1. Analysis by lookup: generate the inflected forms of a Biblical-Hebrew lemma list (from MACULA) and check tokens by a hash lookup, as a fast deterministic filter beside the tools/hbo segmenter. Report the generated-form count as a size statistic.
• I2. An explicit inflection base: when the citation form generates a poor paradigm (the paper's example is a preposition whose paradigm is simpler from another base), store an alternative base for generation. Apply this to the verb and preposition chapters, 05b. Verb paradigms: the strong verb in seven binyanim and the weak roots and Prepositions, prefixes, conjunctions and particles.
• I3. Derivation cross-check: generate deverbal nominals from every verb and match them with the nominals in the lexicon; unmatched pairs show gaps and possible errors. This is a test for 8. Lexicon and register.
• I4. A register field per entry (standard or deviating script, and register): let the analyser accept both spellings while keeping the register visible. Relevant to 2. Script and spelling.

For Mova

I1 is a fast lookup layer for tools/hbo. I2 goes into 05b. Verb paradigms: the strong verb in seven binyanim and the weak roots and Prepositions, prefixes, conjunctions and particles. I3 is a test for 8. Lexicon and register. I4 goes into 2. Script and spelling. The lexicon is NC-licensed, so only the design is used, not its data.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{itai2006computational,
  title = {{A Computational Lexicon of Contemporary Hebrew}},
  author = {Itai, Alon and Wintner, Shuly and Yona, Shlomo},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06)},
  year = {2006},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/L06-1031/}
}

References

10 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Dan Connolly. 1997. XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques. O’Reilly. find
2. Joseph Dichy and Ali Farghaly. 2003. Roots and patterns vs. stems plus grammar-lexis specifications: on what basis should a multilingual lexical databas centered on Arabic be built. In Proceedings of the MT-Summit IX workshop on Machine Translation for Semitic Languages, pages 1–8, New Orleans, September. find
3. Paul DuBois. 1999. MySQL. New Riders. find
4. Nadav Har’El and Dan Kenigsberg. 2004. Hspell: a free Hebrew speller. Available from http://www.ivrix.org.il/projects/-spell-checker/. ↗
5. Alon Lavie, Shuly Wintner, Yaniv Eytani, Erik Peterson, and Katharina Probst. 2004. Rapid prototyping of a transfer-based Hebrew-to-English machine translation system. In Proceedings of TMI-2004: The 10th International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation, Baltimore, MD, October. find our card
6. Erel Segal. 1997. Morphological analyzer for unvocalized hebrew words. Unpublished work, available from http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/-˜erelsgl/hmntx.zip. ↗
7. Meir Shapira and Yaacov Choueka. 1964. Mechano-graphic analysis of Hebrew morphology: possibilities and achievements. Leshonenu, 28(4):354–372. In Hebrew. find
8. Shuly Wintner. 2004. Hebrew computational linguistics: Past and future. Artificial Intelligence Review, 21(2):113–138. find
9. Shlomo Yona and Shuly Wintner. 2005. A finite-state morphological grammar of Hebrew. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, pages 9–16, Ann Arbor, Michigan, June. Association for Computational Linguistics. find our card
10. Yizxaq Zdaqa. 1974. Luxot HaPoal (The Verb Tables). Kiryath Sepher, Jerusalem. In Hebrew. find

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