Towards a cascade of morpho-syntactic tools for Arabic natural language processing

Abstract

This paper presents a cascade of morpho-syntactic tools to deal with Arabic natural language processing. It begins with the description of a large coverage formalization of the Arabic lexicon. The built electronic dictionary, named "El-DicAr", which stands for "Electronic Dictionary for Arabic", links inflectional, morphological, and syntactic-semantic information to the list of lemmas. Automated inflectional and derivational routines are applied to each lemma producing over 3 million inflected forms. El-DicAr represents the linguistic engine for the automatic analyzer, built through a lexical analysis module, and a cascade of morpho-syntactic tools including: a morphological analyzer, a spell-checker, a named entity recognition tool, an automatic annotator and tools for linguistic research and contextual exploration. The morphological analyzer identifies the component morphemes of the agglutinative forms using large coverage morphological grammars. The spell-checker corrects the most frequent typographical errors. The lexical analysis module handles the different vocalization statements in Arabic written texts. Finally, the named entity recognition tool is based on a combination of the morphological analysis results and a set of rules represented as local grammars. © Springer-Verlag 2010.