Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing

✍ Scribed by Nizar Y. Habash

• Publisher: Morgan and Claypool Publishers
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 186
• Series: Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book provides system developers and researchers in natural language processing and computational linguistics with the necessary background information for working with the Arabic language. The goal is to introduce Arabic linguistic phenomena and review the state-of-the-art in Arabic processing. The book discusses Arabic script, phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and semantics, with a final chapter on machine translation issues. The chapter sizes correspond more or less to what is linguistically distinctive about Arabic, with morphology getting the lion's share, followed by Arabic script. No previous knowledge of Arabic is needed. This book is designed for computer scientists and linguists alike. The focus of the book is on Modern Standard Arabic; however, notes on practical issues related to Arabic dialects and languages written in the Arabic script are presented in different chapters. Table of Contents: What is "Arabic"? / Arabic Script / Arabic Phonology and Orthography / Arabic Morphology / Computational Morphology Tasks / Arabic Syntax / A Note on Arabic Semantics / A Note on Arabic and Machine Translation

✦ Table of Contents

Preface......Page 16
Acknowledgments......Page 18
Arabic Language and Arabic Dialects......Page 20
Arabic Script......Page 21
This Book......Page 22
Letters......Page 24
Diacritics......Page 30
Digits......Page 31
Arabic Script Extensions......Page 33
Arabic Typography......Page 34
Arabic Encoding, Input and Display......Page 35
Arabic Input/Output Support......Page 36
Arabic Encodings......Page 37
Orthographic Transliteration......Page 39
Orthographic Normalization......Page 40
Handwriting Recognition......Page 42
Further Readings......Page 43
Basic Concepts......Page 46
A Sketch of Arabic Phonology......Page 47
Phonological Variations among Arabic Dialects and MSA......Page 49
Optional Diacritics......Page 50
Hamza Spelling......Page 51
Morpho-phonemic Spelling......Page 52
Standardization Issues......Page 53
Proper Name Transliteration......Page 54
Speech Recognition and Synthesis......Page 55
Further Readings......Page 56
Form-Based Morphology......Page 58
Functional Morphology......Page 63
Form-Function Independence......Page 65
Cliticization Morphology......Page 66
Inflectional Morphology......Page 69
Derivational Morphology......Page 77
Morphophonemic and Orthographic Adjustments......Page 78
Further Readings......Page 82
Basic Concepts......Page 84
Morphological Analysis and Generation......Page 86
Dimensions of Variation......Page 87
Bama: Buckwalter Arabic Morphological Analyzer......Page 89
Almorgeana: Arabic Lexeme-based Morphological Generation
ewline and Analysis......Page 90
Magead: Morphological Analysis and Generation for Arabic and
ewline its Dialects......Page 91
ElixirFM: Elixir Arabic Functional Morphology......Page 94
Tokenization Schemes and Techniques......Page 95
Various Tokenization Schemes......Page 96
POS Tagging......Page 98
Reduced Buckwalter Tag Sets: Bies, Kulick, ERTS......Page 99
The CATiB POS Tag Set......Page 102
The PADT Tag Set......Page 103
MADA+TOKAN......Page 105
AMIRA......Page 108
Comparing Mada+Tokan with Amira......Page 110
Sentence Structure......Page 112
Nominal Phrase Structure......Page 118
Arabic Treebanks......Page 123
The Penn Arabic Treebank......Page 124
The Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank......Page 125
Comparison: PATB, PADT and CATiB......Page 127
A Forest of Treebanks......Page 130
Further Readings......Page 131
A Brief Note on Terminology......Page 132
Arabic PropBank......Page 133
Arabic WordNet......Page 134
Arabic Resources for Information Extraction......Page 135
Further Readings......Page 136
Basic Concepts of Machine Translation......Page 138
Orthography......Page 139
Morphology......Page 140
Syntax......Page 141
State of the Field of Arabic MT......Page 142
Further Readings......Page 143
Collections of Links......Page 144
Conferences and Workshops......Page 145
Linguistics......Page 148
Computational Linguistics......Page 149
Tutorials and Lectures......Page 150
Speech Corpora......Page 152
Monolingual Text......Page 153
Parallel Text......Page 154
Treebanks......Page 155
Multilingual Dictionaries......Page 156
Gazetteers......Page 157
Semantic Ontologies......Page 158
Morphological Disambiguation and POS Tagging......Page 160
Machine Translation......Page 161
Important Arabic NLP Acronyms......Page 162
Bibliography......Page 166
Author's Biography......Page 186