DALILA: The Dialectal Arabic Linguistic Learning Assistant

International audienceDialectal Arabic (DA) poses serious challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The number and sophistication of tools and datasets in DA are very limited in comparison to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and other languages. MSA tools do not effectively model DA which makes the direct use of MSA NLP tools for handling dialects impractical. This is particularly a challenge for the creation of tools to support learning Arabic as a living language on the web, where authentic material can be found in both MSA and DA. In this paper, we present the Dialectal Arabic Linguistic Learning Assistant (DALILA), a Chrome extension that utilizes cutting-edge Arabic dialect NLP research to assist learners and non-native speakers in understanding text written in either MSA or DA. DALILA provides dialectal word analysis and English gloss corresponding to each word

The Summarization of Arabic News Texts Using Probabilistic Topic Modeling for L2 Micro Learning Tasks

Report submitted as a result, in part, of participation in the Language Flagship Technology Innovation Center's Summer internship program in Summer 2019.The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) combines computer science, linguistic theory, and mathematics. Natural Language Processing applications aim at equipping computers with human linguistic knowledge. Applications such as Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, spelling checkers, as well as text sum- marization, are intriguing fields that exploit the techniques of NLP. Text summariza- tion represents an important NLP task that simplifies various reading tasks. These NLP-based text summarization tasks can be utilized for the benefits of language acquisition.Language Flagship Technology Innovation Cente

Statistical Parsing by Machine Learning from a Classical Arabic Treebank

Research into statistical parsing for English has enjoyed over a decade of successful results. However, adapting these models to other languages has met with difficulties. Previous comparative work has shown that Modern Arabic is one of the most difficult languages to parse due to rich morphology and free word order. Classical Arabic is the ancient form of Arabic, and is understudied in computational linguistics, relative to its worldwide reach as the language of the Quran. The thesis is based on seven publications that make significant contributions to knowledge relating to annotating and parsing Classical Arabic. Classical Arabic has been studied in depth by grammarians for over a thousand years using a traditional grammar known as i’rāb (إعغاة ). Using this grammar to develop a representation for parsing is challenging, as it describes syntax using a hybrid of phrase-structure and dependency relations. This work aims to advance the state-of-the-art for hybrid parsing by introducing a formal representation for annotation and a resource for machine learning. The main contributions are the first treebank for Classical Arabic and the first statistical dependency-based parser in any language for ellipsis, dropped pronouns and hybrid representations. A central argument of this thesis is that using a hybrid representation closely aligned to traditional grammar leads to improved parsing for Arabic. To test this hypothesis, two approaches are compared. As a reference, a pure dependency parser is adapted using graph transformations, resulting in an 87.47% F1-score. This is compared to an integrated parsing model with an F1-score of 89.03%, demonstrating that joint dependency-constituency parsing is better suited to Classical Arabic. The Quran was chosen for annotation as a large body of work exists providing detailed syntactic analysis. Volunteer crowdsourcing is used for annotation in combination with expert supervision. A practical result of the annotation effort is the corpus website: http://corpus.quran.com, an educational resource with over two million users per year

Ensemble Morphosyntactic Analyser for Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic (CA) is an influential language for Muslim lives around the world. It is the language of two sources of Islamic laws: the Quran and the Sunnah, the collection of traditions and sayings attributed to the prophet Mohammed. However, classical Arabic in general, and the Sunnah, in particular, is underexplored and under-resourced in the field of computational linguistics. This study examines the possible directions for adapting existing tools, specifically morphological analysers, designed for modern standard Arabic (MSA) to classical Arabic. Morphological analysers of CA are limited, as well as the data for evaluating them. In this study, we adapt existing analysers and create a validation data-set from the Sunnah books. Inspired by the advances in deep learning and the promising results of ensemble methods, we developed a systematic method for transferring morphological analysis that is capable of handling different labelling systems and various sequence lengths. In this study, we handpicked the best four open access MSA morphological analysers. Data generated from these analysers are evaluated before and after adaptation through the existing Quranic Corpus and the Sunnah Arabic Corpus. The findings are as follows: first, it is feasible to analyse under-resourced languages using existing comparable language resources given a small sufficient set of annotated text. Second, analysers typically generate different errors and this could be exploited. Third, an explicit alignment of sequences and the mapping of labels is not necessary to achieve comparable accuracies given a sufficient size of training dataset. Adapting existing tools is easier than creating tools from scratch. The resulting quality is dependent on training data size and number and quality of input taggers. Pipeline architecture performs less well than the End-to-End neural network architecture due to error propagation and limitation on the output format. A valuable tool and data for annotating classical Arabic is made freely available

First International Workshop on Lexical Resources

International audienceLexical resources are one of the main sources of linguistic information for research and applications in Natural Language Processing and related fields. In recent years advances have been achieved in both symbolic aspects of lexical resource development (lexical formalisms, rule-based tools) and statistical techniques for the acquisition and enrichment of lexical resources, both monolingual and multilingual. The latter have allowed for faster development of large-scale morphological, syntactic and/or semantic resources, for widely-used as well as resource-scarce languages. Moreover, the notion of dynamic lexicon is used increasingly for taking into account the fact that the lexicon undergoes a permanent evolution.This workshop aims at sketching a large picture of the state of the art in the domain of lexical resource modeling and development. It is also dedicated to research on the application of lexical resources for improving corpus-based studies and language processing tools, both in NLP and in other language-related fields, such as linguistics, translation studies, and didactics

Mixed-Language Arabic- English Information Retrieval

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis attempts to address the problem of mixed querying in CLIR. It proposes mixed-language (language-aware) approaches in which mixed queries are used to retrieve most relevant documents, regardless of their languages. To achieve this goal, however, it is essential firstly to suppress the impact of most problems that are caused by the mixed-language feature in both queries and documents and which result in biasing the final ranked list. Therefore, a cross-lingual re-weighting model was developed. In this cross-lingual model, term frequency, document frequency and document length components in mixed queries are estimated and adjusted, regardless of languages, while at the same time the model considers the unique mixed-language features in queries and documents, such as co-occurring terms in two different languages. Furthermore, in mixed queries, non-technical terms (mostly those in non-English language) would likely overweight and skew the impact of those technical terms (mostly those in English) due to high document frequencies (and thus low weights) of the latter terms in their corresponding collection (mostly the English collection). Such phenomenon is caused by the dominance of the English language in scientific domains. Accordingly, this thesis also proposes reasonable re-weighted Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) so as to moderate the effect of overweighted terms in mixed queries

Using automatic speech recognition to evaluate Arabic to English transliteration

Increased travel and international communication has led to an increased need for transliteration of Arabic proper names for people, places, technical terms and organisations. There are a variety of available Arabic to English transliteration systems such as Unicode, the Buckwalter Arabic transliteration, and ArabTeX. The transliteration tables have been developed and used by researchers for many years, but there are only limited attempts to evaluate and compare different transliteration systems. This thesis investigates whether or not speech recognition technology could be used to evaluate different Arabic-English transliteration systems. In order to do so there were 5 main objectives: firstly, to investigate the possibility of using English speech recognition engines to recognize Arabic words; secondly, to establish the possibility of automatic transliteration of diacritised Arabic words for the purpose of creating a vocabulary for the speech recognition engine; thirdly, to explore the possibility of automatically generating transliterations of non diacritised Arabic words; fourthly to construct a general method to compare and evaluate different transliteration; and finally, to test the system and use it to experiment with new transliterations ideas

A morphological-syntactical analysis approach for Arabic textual tagging

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is the process of labeling or classifying each word in written text with its grammatical category or part-of-speech, i.e. noun, verb, preposition, adjective, etc. It is the most common disambiguation process in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). POS tagging systems are often preprocessors in many NLP applications. The Arabic language has a valuable and an important feature, called diacritics, which are marks placed over and below the letters of the word. An Arabic text is partiallyvocalisedl when the diacritical mark is assigned to one or maximum two letters in the word. Diacritics in Arabic texts are extremely important especially at the end of the word. They help determining not only the correct POS tag for each word in the sentence, but also in providing full information regarding the inflectional features, such as tense, number, gender, etc. for the sentence words. They add semantic information to words which helps with resolving ambiguity in the meaning of words. Furthermore, diacritics ascribe grammatical functions to the words, differentiating the word from other words, and determining the syntactic position of the word in the sentence. 1. Vocalisation (also referred as diacritisation or vowelisation). This thesis presents a rule-based Part-of-Speech tagging system called AMT - short for Arabic Morphosyntactic Tagger. The main function of the AMT system is to assign the correct tag to each word in an untagged raw partially-vocalised Arabic corpus, and to produce a POS tagged corpus without using a manually tagged or untagged lexicon (dictionary) for training. Two different techniques were used in this work, the pattem-based technique and the lexical and contextual technique. The rules in the pattem-based technique technique are based on the pattern of the testing word. A novel algorithm, Pattern-Matching Algorithm (PMA), has been designed and introduced in this work. The aim of this algorithm is to match the testing word with its correct pattern in pattern lexicon. The lexical and contextual technique on the other hand is used to assist the pattembased technique technique to assign the correct tag to those words not have a pattern to follow. The rules in the lexical and contextual technique are based on the character(s), the last diacritical mark, the word itself, and the tags of the surrounding words. The importance of utilizing the diacritic feature of the Arabic language to reduce the lexical ambiguity in POS tagging has been addressed. In addition, a new Arabic tag set and a new partially-vocalised Arabic corpus to test AMT have been compiled and presented in this work. The AMT system has achieved an average accuracy of 91 %

Meaning refinement to improve cross-lingual information retrieval

Magdeburg, Univ., Fak. für Informatik, Diss., 2012von Farag Ahme