Implementation of the Arabic numerals and their syntax in GF

Abstract

The numeral system of Arabic is rich in its morphosyntactic variety yet suffers from the lack of a good computational resource that describes it in a reusable way. This implies that applications that require the use of rules of the Arabic numeral system have to either reimplement them each time, which implies wasted resources, or use simplified, imprecise rules that result in low quality applications. A solution has been devised with Grammatical Framework (GF) to use language constructs and grammars as libraries that can be written once and reused in various applications. In this paper, we describe our implementation of the Arabic numeral system, as an example of a bigger implementation of a grammar library for Arabic. We show that users can reuse our system by accessing a simple language-independent API rule.