A New Rule-Based Approach for Classical Arabic in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Named entity recognition (NER) is fundamental in several natural language processing applications. It involves finding and categorizing text into predefined categories such as a person's name, location, and so on. One of the most famous approaches to identify named entity is the rule-based approach. This paper introduces a rule-based NER method that can be used to examine Classical Arabic documents. The proposed method relied on triggers words, patterns, gazetteers, rules, and blacklists generated by the linguistic information about entities named in Arabic. The method operates in three stages, operational stage, preprocessing stage, and processing the rule application stage. The proposed approach was evaluated, and the results indicate that this approach achieved a 90.2% rate of precision, an 89.3% level of recall, and an F-measure of 89.5%. This new approach was introduced to overcome the challenges related to coverage in rule-based NER systems, especially when dealing with Classical Arabic texts. It improved their performance and allowed for automated rule updates. The grammar rules, gazetteers, blacklist, patterns, and trigger words were all integrated into the rule-based system in this way.