AN IMPROVED ALGORITHM FOR THE EXTRACTION OF TRILITERAL ARABIC ROOTS

Stemming in the Arabic language is extracting the root form of the verb, removing inflectional affixes and derivational morphemes. Stemming is a share form of language processing in the systems of information retrieval. It is similar to the morphological processing used in natural language processing, but to some extent has different aims. Stemming is used to reduce word forms to common words. Stemming is the process of removing all affixes from a word to extract its root. This paper describes a stemming algorithm that has been developed for the Arabic language. The algorithm utilizes an important morphological aspect of the Arabic language. The algorithm examines the word and extracts its root. It examines the word letter by letter starting from the end of the word, i.e., from the last letter of the word to the first. The algorithm correctly stems most Arabic words that are derived from roots, and achieves high rate of accuracy. The algorithm has been tested on a corpus of 242 abstracts of Arabic documents from the Proceedings of the Saudi Arabian National Conference

Master of Arts

thesisStudies have shown that English speakers use first noun strategy in NVN word order to interpret these sentences as SVO, and that they use second noun strategy in VNN and NNV word order to interpret sentences as VOS and OSV, respectively (Harrington, 1987). In contrast, Taman (1993) found that Arabic native speakers rely primarily on gender agreement, followed by case marking and animacy to assign agency. This study investigates whether and/or how second language (L2) learners of Arabic use word order and subject-verb agreement to assign an actor role in simple sentences. It assesses the role of first language (L1) (English) in processing Arabic sentences, and how L2 processing develops with increasing exposure to the language. The purpose of this study is (1) to determine whether L2 learners of Arabic enrolled in their first year show L1 transfer and use word order to assign a subject role, and (2) if so, to what extent additional exposure to Arabic will decrease reliance of word order and increase reliance on verb agreement. Language use patterns of three groups of L2 learners enrolled in first, second, and third year Arabic classes were examined. Participants read simple Arabic sentences and chose the subject of the sentence by button press (Bates et al., 1999, Experiment 3 & 4; Brandl, 2013; Kempe & MacWhinney, 1999). The dependent variable, frequency of choosing 1N, was calculated as a function of subject-verb variation for each group of students within the VNN and NVN word order. This study tentatively suggests that there might be an L1 transfer at the beginning stages of learning Arabic, and learners shift to use the L2 cues in processing L2 sentences with more exposure to the language. It also suggests some implications for L2 pedagogy. Whether it is because of L1 transfer or universal strategies, the Beginner group did not utilize the verb agreement to assign actor role regardless of the fact that they received explicit instructions about verb agreement in Arabic

ORTHOGRAPHIC ENRICHMENT FOR ARABIC GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Linguistics, 2010The Arabic orthography is problematic in two ways: (1) it lacks the short vowels, and this leads to ambiguity as the same orthographic form can be pronounced in many different ways each of which can have its own grammatical category, and (2) the Arabic word may contain several units like pronouns, conjunctions, articles and prepositions without an intervening white space. These two problems lead to difficulties in the automatic processing of Arabic. The thesis proposes a pre-processing scheme that applies word segmentation and word vocalization for the purpose of grammatical analysis: part of speech tagging and parsing. The thesis examines the impact of human-produced vocalization and segmentation on the grammatical analysis of Arabic, then applies a pipeline of automatic vocalization and segmentation for the purpose of Arabic part of speech tagging. The pipeline is then used, along with the POS tags produced, for the purpose of dependency parsing, which produces grammatical relations between the words in a sentence. The study uses the memory-based algorithm for vocalization, segmentation, and part of speech tagging, and the natural language parser MaltParser for dependency parsing. The thesis represents the first approach to the processing of real-world Arabic, and has found that through the correct choice of features and algorithms, the need for pre-processing for grammatical analysis can be minimized

Translation Recognition in Learners of Arabic

The current study explored the role of phonology in the processing of Arabic words in native English speakers learning Arabic. Previous research demonstrates that three factors play a role in the mental processing of multiple languages: orthography, phonology, and semantics. Cognate studies have revealed that orthography is not the most important factor, but the roles of phonology and semantics are still indistinguishable from one another. The current study utilized phonologically-embedded English words within Arabic words at three different points in the word, beginning, middle, and end, to determine the role of phonology separate from that of semantics (e.g., [written Arabic] pronounced tareekh, and tar is a beginning overlap pair). Participants from the University of Arkansas Arabic language program completed a translation recognition task. They were shown an Arabic word, followed by an English word, and asked to identify whether the English word was the correct translation. It was predicted that participants would take longer to say “no” to false translations with phonological overlap than to false translations without phonological overlap and that less experienced learners would exhibit this effect to a higher degree than more experienced learners. While, as predicted, the reaction times for false translations with phonological overlap were substantially slower than reaction times for false translations without phonological overlap in beginning and middle overlap conditions, no significant differences were found. Arabic proficiency was found to be negatively correlated with amount of phonological interference. The results generally support the importance of phonology in the mental processing of multiple languages, which can be combined with other findings in language research to supplement language learning programs

Smart I’rab: Smart Aplicasion for Arabic Grammar Learning

Arabic grammar, known as nahwu, is necessary to comprehend the Holy Qur’an that is completely written in Arabic. However, many people get trouble to study this skill because there are various kinds of word formation and sentences that may be created from a single verb, noun, adjective, subject, predicate, object, adverb or another formation. This research proposes a new approach to identify the position and word function in Arabic sentence. The approach creates smart process that employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) and expert system with modeling based on knowledge and inference engine in determining the word position. The knowledge base determines the part of speech while the inference engine shows the word function in the sentence. On processing, the system uses 82 templates consisting of 34 verb templates, 34 subject pronouns, 14 pronouns for object or possessive word. All the templates are in the form of char array for harakat (vowel) and letters which become the comparators for determining the part of speech from input word sentence. Output from the system is an i’rab (the explanation of word function in sentence) written in Arabic. The system has been tested for 159 times to examine word and sentence. The examination for word that is done 117 times has not made any error except for the word that is really like another word. While the detection for word function in sentence that is done 42 times experiment, there is no error too. An error happens when the part of speech from the word being examined is not included in the system yet, influencing the following word function detection.Keywords: I’rab, Arabic grammar, NLP, expert system, knowledge base, inference engin

Does visual letter similarity modulate masked form priming in young readers of Arabic?

Available online 19 January 2018 Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004.Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004.We carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment to study whether visual letter similarity plays a role during the initial phases of word processing in young readers of Arabic (fifth graders). Arabic is ideally suited to test these effects because most Arabic letters share their basic shape with at least one other letter and differ only in the number/position of diacritical points (e.g., ض - ص ;ظ - ط ;غ - ع ;ث - ت - ن ب ;ذ - د ;خ - ح - ج ;ق - ف ;ش - س ;ز - ر). We created two one-letter-different priming conditions for each target word, in which a letter from the consonantal root was substituted by another letter that did or did not keep the same shape (e.g., خدمة - حدمة vs. خدمة - فدمة). Another goal of the current experiment was to test the presence of masked orthographic priming effects, which are thought to be unreliable in Semitic languages. To that end, we included an unrelated priming condition. We found a sizable masked orthographic priming effect relative to the unrelated condition regardless of visual letter similarity, thereby revealing that young readers are able to quickly process the diacritical points of Arabic letters. Furthermore, the presence of masked orthographic priming effects in Arabic suggests that the word identification stream in Indo-European and Semitic languages is more similar than previously thought.This article was made possible by a National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) award (Grant No. 6-378-5-035z) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation)

Does visual letter similarity modulate masked form priming in young readers of Arabic?

Available online 19 January 2018 Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004.Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004.We carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment to study whether visual letter similarity plays a role during the initial phases of word processing in young readers of Arabic (fifth graders). Arabic is ideally suited to test these effects because most Arabic letters share their basic shape with at least one other letter and differ only in the number/position of diacritical points (e.g., ض - ص ;ظ - ط ;غ - ع ;ث - ت - ن ب ;ذ - د ;خ - ح - ج ;ق - ف ;ش - س ;ز - ر). We created two one-letter-different priming conditions for each target word, in which a letter from the consonantal root was substituted by another letter that did or did not keep the same shape (e.g., خدمة - حدمة vs. خدمة - فدمة). Another goal of the current experiment was to test the presence of masked orthographic priming effects, which are thought to be unreliable in Semitic languages. To that end, we included an unrelated priming condition. We found a sizable masked orthographic priming effect relative to the unrelated condition regardless of visual letter similarity, thereby revealing that young readers are able to quickly process the diacritical points of Arabic letters. Furthermore, the presence of masked orthographic priming effects in Arabic suggests that the word identification stream in Indo-European and Semitic languages is more similar than previously thought.This article was made possible by a National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) award (Grant No. 6-378-5-035z) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation)

Structure, form, and meaning in the mental lexicon: evidence from Arabic.

Does the organization of the mental lexicon reflect the combination of abstract underlying morphemic units or the concatenation of word-level phonological units? We address these fundamental issues in Arabic, a Semitic language where every surface form is potentially analyzable into abstract morphemic units - the word pattern and the root - and where this view contrasts with stem-based approaches, chiefly driven by linguistic considerations, in which neither roots nor word patterns play independent roles in word formation and lexical representation. Five cross-modal priming experiments examine the processing of morphologically complex forms in the three major subdivisions of the Arabic lexicon - deverbal nouns, verbs, and primitive nouns. The results demonstrate that root and word pattern morphemes function as abstract cognitive entities, operating independently of semantic factors and dissociable from possible phonological confounds, while stem-based approaches consistently fail to accommodate the basic psycholinguistic properties of the Arabic mental lexicon